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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerakSpielman" data-source="post: 1241772" data-attributes="member: 7464">Generally speaking, if you cut out mean but ensure that your protein intake is ok, a vegetarian diet is more healthy than a omnivore diet. The primary benefit is the lack of fat ingested with the meat. It's really hard to judge the overall healthfulness of veggie diets because vegetarians, being generally more health conscious, are more likely to take vitamins, excercise, and visit their doctor regularly. Which of these activities contribues more to their better overall health? It is difficult or impossible to measure. The primary arguments for vegetarianism are: 1) Moral grounds. We don't have the right to end the lives of other creatures to sustain our own lives. Some people place greater importance on the lives of animals than others. It is pointless to debate this because people generally don't change their minds on the subject. 2) Health reasons. Generally speaking, your typical vegetarian diet is more healthy then your typical omnivoristic diet. It should be noted that it's possible to be perfectly healthy on either diet if you bother to watch what you eat, and possible to eat unhealithy on either diet, if you don't pay attention. 3) Environmental reasons: Meat takes enormous amounts of resources to produce. If the fields currently used to grow animal feed were devoted to producing vegetable human food, while eliminating livestock production, considerably more people could be fed total. There are other, more complex environmental arguments, including the laughable "cow farts" theory, which adds up the total amount of methane produced by the rear ends of cows worldwide and goes on to predict atmospheric devistation. 4) It feels better. Some vegetarians claim an ephemeral feeling of being more "clean" or "pure," or  that they are living a more simple, down-to-earth life. If it makes you feel better about yourself as a person and the life you lead, it's hard to tell you not to do it. IMPORTANT NOTE/DISCLAIMER!It's possible to argue all these points one way or the other, and it's best to NOT have such discussions at EnWorld since tempers generally rise on both sides. This information is given to help you better understand what might have motivated her to make this decision. It's often a subtle combination of all the reasons above. It might be primarily for health reasons, but almost always there is some influence from the other reasons too. You and her might be happier if you can figure out exactly what her fundamental motivations really are, especially in the area of not making a faux-pas at a bad moment. Also, on a final note, a lot of people flirt briefly with vegetarianism and then abandon it. My wife and I did this - we were strict vegetarians for about 4 months. Then we decided it wasn't for us. So don't worry about relationship problems because of the different diets - either she'll give up on it, you'll grow to care too much about her to let diet get in the way, or you'll become a vegetarian yourself.</blockquote>

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