/2011/07/27/why-you-should-not-be-a-vegetarian/
{"item":{"status":"visible","url":"\/2011\/07\/27\/why-you-should-not-be-a-vegetarian\/","trash":"","name":"why-you-should-not-be-a-vegetarian","parent":"","title":"Why you should not be a vegetarian","date":"2011-07-27 15:57:12","filepath":"posts\/2000305_why-you-should-not-be-a-vegetarian.xml.json","type":"post","content":"<img class=\"size-full wp-image-306 alignleft\" title=\"brain\" src=\"http:\/\/www.8bitrobot.com\/media\/uploads\/2011\/07\/brain-icon.jpg\" alt=\"brain\" width=\"107\" height=\"75\" \/>There are health concerns for any diet, be it\u00a0vegetarian,\u00a0Atkins, or the popular <a href=\"http:\/\/cdn.mos.totalfilm.com\/images\/s\/street-trash-195-75.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">liquid diet<\/a>. \u00a0Here are some data points explaining why eating calorie dense foods like meat is a good thing.\n<div style=\"clear:both;\"><\/div>\n<blockquote>\"A three-pound human brain burns up to 20 times as many calories as three pounds of muscle.\"\n\n\"Twenty-five percent of all the calories you eat each day end up fueling your brain.\"\n\n\"...This dramatic increase in brain size required a dramatic increase in metabolism.\"<\/blockquote>\nSo, how do we pay for it? \u00a0For one, we're weaker:\n<blockquote>\"Our muscles contain fewer glucose transporters than in chimps' muscles.\"\n\n\"...Our ancestors evolved extra molecular pumps to funnel sugar into the brain, while starving muscles by giving them fewer transporters.\"<\/blockquote>\nAnother possibly is our smaller guts:\n<blockquote>\"[Our guts] weigh only 60 percent of what you'd normally expect in a primate of our size. \u00a0Intestinal cells also need a lot of energy, because they are highly innervated. \u00a0Losing such a big portion of their guts could have allowed our ancestors to compensate for much of the brain's extra energy demand.\"<\/blockquote>\nHowever our diet has more of an impact on brain size:\n<blockquote>\"...Leonard found A switch from lower-energy diets of bark and leaves to higher-energy cuisines of seeds, tubers, and meat in the brainer species.\"\n\n\"As brain-to-body ratio increases, presumably, the denser calories supply the additional needed fuel.\"<\/blockquote>\nWhich is why being a vegetarian is an unhealthy yearning for the past; the very distant past.\n\n<em>Quotations are from <a href=\"http:\/\/discover.coverleaf.com\/discovermagazine\/20110708?pg=21#pg21\" target=\"_blank\">\"The Brain\"<\/a> by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/carlzimmer.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Carl Zimmer<\/a> over at <a href=\"http:\/\/discovermagazine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Discover Magazine<\/a>.<\/em>\n\n<em>read the <a href=\"http:\/\/discover.coverleaf.com\/discovermagazine\/20110708?pg=21#pg21\" target=\"_blank\">article<\/a><\/em>"}}
