On Friday, March 5, 2004, at 06:32  AM, Thomas Dekany wrote:

> On another note the unhealthiest looking people in health food stores
> are type O vegetarians.
> Thomas

A funny thing I read a while back. You know, there are some very
healthy looking vegetarians (my niece, who does eat eggs). Well, a
survey of self described vegetarians asked them, " When was the last
time you ate meat?". 40% answered "within the last 24 hours"!

A related item was a college biology professor who measured the protein
of his students' bodies, and found that even many of those who claimed
to be strict vegans were actually regularly eating some meat, but not
admitting it until he showed them the results of the test.

I suspect that the number of true vegans is very very small. This would
greatly skew any study of the health benefits of vegetarianism. I don't
doubt that a health conscious vegetarian, who continued to eat a little
meat fairly regularly, along with lots of fruits and veggies, would be
much healthier than some couch potato junk food eater, who would
naturally end up in the survey as a generic "meat eater". I have yet to
read any study that accounted for this deceit factor in self-reported
vegetarians, or one that tried to separate out health conscious meat
eaters from the general population, and compare them to vegetarians.

I wonder, would a junk food eating vegetarian be less healthy than a
junk food eating meat eater? I think so.