Bothered by story on the local news

[Beth H]

Last night I was watching our local yokels. A story came on about eating healthier, with a focus on vegetarianism. There were several things about this story that really bothered me.

1. The story equated vegetarianism with a healthy diet with no caveats. I do think being a vegetarian is healthy, and I do think that eating less red meat, etc. is healthy, but just because you become a vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean that you are eating healthy. I mean, you could still be eating a lot of sweets and snack foods.
2. What really bothered me was the discussion in the story of the raw foods diet. For those not familiar with this trend, it essentially is eating nothing cooked - or foods just cooked to 110 degrees. I really don't want to get into a discussion of this diet, but in the story the reporter made it seem as though being on a raw foods diet was exactly the same as being a vegetarian! They threw that diet in there along with the discussion about vegetarianism with no attempt to discuss how the raw foods diet is a relatively recent trend, etc.

I thought the story was irresponsible. I'd be interested to know what others think.

[Valerie226]

Being vegetarian requires more than not eating meat but the typical evening news spends 2 minutes doing it's typical gloss-over. I mean, fritos and pop for breakfast, energy bar for lunch, cereal for dinner may be vegetarian but is certainly not a good diet. I think there is an assumption that if you are "vegetarian" that you are putting more thought and planning into your diet than just stuffing in a burger and fries. I think that's a false assumption in many cases.
Actually I've concluded that the TV news is no place to get your news!.

[gertdog]

Well, I'm living proof that a vegetarian diet is not necessarily "healthier"- when I first became a vegetarian, I just ate lots of pasta and cheese. And guess what- I gained a LOT of weight. This was due to more than just my eating habits, but it certainly didn't help!

Of course vegetarianism can be very healthy, but so can non-vegetarian diets. It does sound as though your newscasters were either uninformed, or skimmed over a lot of the details in order to make the story fit into a 1-minute sound bite.

[DocAgocs]

The vast majority of vegetarians I know are actually pastatarians or some other form of refinedcarbotarian. Being really healthy and not eating any animal foods is next to impossible. Lacto-ovo vegetarians have a ot easier time getting the necessary proteins their bodies need to be healthy. It's tough. As far as the raw food diet, you could be a complete meatatrian and eat completely raw food if you wanted, so the two have nothing to do with one another. While eating raw foods is important some things in the diet are hard to get from ONLY raw foods, so again, you can go too far with it. But, the likeliehood that a news story on pretty much anything is going to be very accurate is, ironically, slim.