Tension between low-carb dieters and vegetarians unwarranted: be a low-carb vegetarian

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I'm fascinated by the tension between vegetarians and low-carb diet advocates. Why? Because I'm both a vegetarian and a low-carber. Neither refined carbohydrates (white flour, refined sugar, processed grains, high fructose corn syrup, etc.) nor red meat (rife with health risks and endangered by mad cow disease) belong in the diets of people who wish to be healthy in my opinion. I avoid both.

I still eat meat: seafood, mostly. When traveling, I'll settle for chicken meat when nothing else is available, but I steadfastly avoid meat from mammals. It's more than just a nutritional decision, too: the treatment of animals by the cattle and pork industries is nothing less than criminal. If images of what actually goes on in the slaughterhouses were televised, there would be a national outrage and people would stop eating red meat (that's why they don't televise the images, of course). Treating intelligent, conscious animals as sources of food to simply be fattened up and slaughtered for profit is nothing short of evil. That's why I strongly support PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, even though this group regularly attacks the Atkins diet.

If you're finding all this confusing and don't know which box to put me into, join the crowd. I think Dr. Atkins was a hero for standing up to the medical community and helping people realize the health dangers of sugar and refined, processed foods. But turning to red meat, saturated fat, and fried foods is a nutritional disaster. That's why I wrote Low-Carb Diet Warning which seeks to educate low-carb dieters about how to make their diets healthy. In truth, the vast majority of people on low-carb diets are simply trading one disease (obesity) for another (heart disease, usually). Sure, you lose weight, but you pay the price later.

On the other hand, a vegetarian diet isn't automatically healthy, either. I've seen vegetarians pigging out on donuts while saying, "No meat!" You'd be amazed to learn how many vegetarian food products contain metabolic disruptors such as monosodium glutamate (hidden as "yeast extract" on the ingredients label). And many vegetarians suffer from very real nutritional deficiencies -- and I'm not just talking about vitamin B12, either. They suffer from deficiencies in zinc, calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and many others.

Of course, by and large, vegetarians are far healthier than everybody else, because avoiding meat (especially red meat) is a sound nutritional strategy. So, you see, this whole issue isn't black and white. Both the low-carb dieters and vegetarians have their good points and bad points. That's why I take the best from both worlds: I'm a low-carb vegetarian.

You might ask, well what do you eat then? What else is there? There's plenty of food that's both low-carb and vegetarian. Nature has provided an endless buffet of vegetables, beans, legumes, seeds, nuts, fruits, superfoods like chlorella and spirulina, herbs, medicinal plants, whole grains, and so on. That's all you really need to be healthy and happy. You don't need to kill cows and pigs to be healthy, and you don't need to eat white flour, processed foods, soft drinks and all the popular junk foods sold at practically every grocery store in the country.

One more thing: I don't eat or drink dairy products, either. Cow's milk is outstanding nutrition of you're a small furry cow, but if you're an adult human being, cow's milk is a nutritional trainwreck. Humans are the only species on the planet that will drink the breast milk of another species. Not surprisingly, the nutritional content of cow's milk is designed to grow big cows with small brains, which is why cow's milk has almost no GLA (gamma-linolenic acid, an essential oil for human brain function) and is deficient in other minerals and vitamins needed by humans. Babies who drink cow's milk are, studies have shown, not as smart as babies who drink human breast milk. So when I say that drinking cow's milk is "stupid," I don't mean it as an insult: I mean it as a clinical description!

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