Seven million people in the United States call themselves vegetarians. But while vegetarians claim their diets are healthier, many carnivores and omnivores extol the virtues of eating high on the hog: Consuming meat, after all, is simply following nature's dictate, for hungry humans have been devouring everything they could lay their hands on through at least the past 100,000 years of evolutionary history, and probably much longer. So who's got legitimate bragging rights? Evidence has been building for two decades that people who eat a mostly vegetarian diet have the upper hand. But even scientific studies may not be enough to convince meat eaters to give up their lust for flesh in exchange for a longer, more disease-free life.

Colon cancer survivors who eat a "Western" diet high in red meat, fats and refined grains are more than three times as likely to have a recurrence as those who consume a "prudent" diet high in fish, poultry, fruits and vegetables, researchers said [August 14]. Scientists already knew that avoiding a Western diet could reduce the risk of contracting colon cancer in the first place, but this is the first study associating the diet with a recurrence of the disease.

One's diet is believed to play an important role in the causation of prostate cancer. Epidemiological studies, looking at different populations where the incidence of prostate cancer varies widely, suggest that differences in diet may partly account for these variations. It is known, for example, that Asian men living in Asia have a very low incidence of prostate cancer. However, when these men migrate to America and adopt a Westernised lifestyle, within a generation, their incidence of prostate cancer approximates that of their white American counterparts.

Studies suggest the following as potential protective dietary factors: tomatoes and tomato-derived products, pomegranates, cruciferous vegetables, vitamin E, selenium, fish and omega-3 fatty acids [Editor's note: VegE-News encourages non-fish omega 3 sources such as flax and walnuts], soy, isoflavones and green tea with polyphenols. Dietary factors which increase prostate cancer risk in adult men include dairy products, calcium, zinc at high doses, saturated fat, grilled meats, heterocyclic amines and high caloric intake. Calcium-rich foods such as milk, butter, cheese, yogurt and ice cream should be minimised to reduce prostate cancer risk.

Michael Moore's movie, "Sicko," is his attempt at placing blame for the American health care crisis on the shoulders of the pharmaceutical companies and the government. Clearly, governmental agencies that are supposedly looking out for the welfare of the citizens are far from innocent, and pharmaceutical companies are anything but good Samaritans, but Michael couldn't be more wrong on this one and need not look too much further than his own mirror to see the real problem. His denial is problem #2.

The fact is, Michael Moore is just another cog in the big, dysfunctional machine that Americans currently call "health care." It is actually "disease care," and therein lies problem #3. Are you beginning to see a pattern here? Michael Moore wants to engage in a problematic way of life and then make those problems that he's created someone else's problem. That's problem # 4. Where does personal responsibility fit in to Michael Moore's paradigm? For those who care to deal in reality, until people take responsibility for their own lives and their own health, there will not be health. The truth is, our diet is directly responsible for well over 80 percent of the diseases from which we suffer. [By "The Vegan Sage" Jeff Popick.]

Over-fishing has made Atlantic bluefin tuna a prized delicacy a century after the fish were scorned in Europe as pet food, according to studies that urged better international protection. "Tuna are now like floating goldmines out in the ocean," said Brian MacKenzie of the Technical University of Denmark. Bluefin tuna, which spawn in the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean, can be worth $10,000-15,000 each in Japan, where they are eaten raw as sushi, said Andre Boustany, an expert at Duke University in the United States. One single fish sold for a record $178,000. The Atlantic bluefin stock has plunged in recent decades, meaning that even a total halt to fishing might not help stocks revive, he said.

The men huddled under billowing green ponchos and shouldered their AK-47s nervously. Summer rains drenched the plains and canopied jungle of Virunga National Park, a vast preserve along the eastern border of the Democratic Republic of Congo that is home to an estimated 60 percent of the world's surviving mountain gorillas. The men allowed the rain to douse their cigarettes. Then, in single file, they began to move into the forest. Through the din of the storm, a shout quickly rose up.

The rangers found the first corpse less than a hundred yards away, in a grove of vines and crooked thicket. The mammoth gorilla lay on her side, a small pink tongue protruding slightly from her lips. She was pregnant and her breasts were engorged with milk for the baby that now lay dead inside her womb. The rangers crowded around and caressed the gorilla's singed fur. They shook their heads and clicked their tongues with disapproval. One grabbed her hand and held it for a long time, his head bowed in grief.

What visitor to Whole Foods (aka "Whole Paycheck") hasn't stared in slack-jawed wonder at bluefoot mushrooms imported from Europe ($39.99 per pound), off-season organic grapefruit from Texas ($2.49 per softball-size fruit), organic almond butter ($14.99 a pound) or pine nuts ($13.99 a pound)? In a world of $1 double cheeseburgers, it's no wonder that many people suspect that a vegetarian diet is more expensive than one that includes meat. But that's generally not true.

Most of the staples of a vegetarian diet are cheap. In fact, most of the world's people eat a mostly vegetarian diet made up of inexpensive commodities such as beans, rice and corn. If you drop red meat, poultry and fish from your diet, you'll find plant proteins cheaper than the equivalent amount of animal protein. In the long run, no matter how much you spend on a vegetarian or semivegetarian diet, you'll likely see a payoff in better health, lower risk of chronic disease and reduced health-care costs compared with someone who eats a typical American diet. Dollars and cents aside, how much is it worth to live without heart disease, cancer or diabetes for the last decades of your life? How much is it worth to lower your risk of dying [prematurely]?

Every time I sit down to eat at a restaurant, it's the same dilemma: Should I choose what I want or order vegetarian? Sometimes I'm lucky and what I want is meatless. But if what I really want is the boeuf bourguignon or the veal pepperonata, I squirm, caught between moral horror, my taste buds and a desire not to be the "weird" vegetarian. I'm 38, and I have been engaged in this internal war, off and on, for nearly 20 years. I have been a vegetarian, semivegetarian and old-fashioned carnivore. Right now, I eat everything - but with a pervasive sense of unease. I thought my dilemma would get clearer over time - that my sense of what's right, at least right for me, would have naturally evolved toward some conclusion. But it hasn't. I'm more torn than ever.

We relegate thoughts about the creatures we eat to about the same space we give to any crisis halfway around the world that we feel we can't understand or have a direct impact on. We don't like to think about it because there's so little we feel we can do about it. We make assumptions that negate the pain and suffering (at least in the case of the animals) and absolve ourselves of responsibility in preventing or relieving it. Just because we turn our back on the situation doesn't mean it isn't there anymore. But what is our responsibility? Or, at the very least, what is mine? Much as I try to ignore the question and dig in, it haunts me whenever I eat meat... Am I incapable of exercising empathy when it's inconvenient? Which leaves me to contemplate a particular irony: It is not other people but animals who are forcing me to consider the depth and breadth of my humanity. Every time I pick up a menu.

No sex, please, you're a carnivore. A new phenomenon in New Zealand is taking the idea of you are what you eat to the extreme. Vegansexuals are people who do not eat any meat or animal products, and who choose not to be sexually intimate with non-vegan partners whose bodies, they say, are made up of dead animals. The co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human and Animal Studies at Canterbury University, Annie Potts, said she coined the term after doing research on the lives of "cruelty-free consumers." Many female respondents described being attracted to people who ate meat, but said they did not want to have sex with meat-eaters because their bodies were made up of animal carcasses. "It's a whole new thing - I have not come across it before," said Potts.

Sgt. Scott Cary used to fit that ugly stereotype: A burger-munching cop in an extra-large uniform, he couldn't make time in his stressed-out life for exercise. Today, though, he's decked in running shorts and a T-shirt, pacing the sidewalk as he waits for the Austin Police Department Running Team to show up for their Tuesday night workout. Cary formed this team three years ago, hoping to help his co-workers do what he did - hone muscle, shed weight and ease tension... He compares giving up meat to quitting cigarettes, which he did in 1976, or cutting out alcohol, which he did in 1981. "You give it up one meal at a time," he says. "I didn't quit meat for animal rights, I did it for my own health. And I can't ever see going back to my old eating habits."

With its pasty flesh, tightly sealed under cellophane wrapping, the chicken sitting on a blue polystyrene tray on the shelf at Asda really doesn't look like much of an 'icon.' Yet this is how the superstore retailer is marketing its £2 medium-sized British chicken, claiming that the cheap bird's powerful allure makes it one of the few products for which customers will 'cross town' to pop in the shopping trolley. Indeed, weighing 1.55kg and sporting a Union Jack label to assure buyers of its provenance, the Asda chicken is flying off the shelves.

The big question is: how on earth is it possible to sell a chicken at such an extraordinarily low price? The chickens we eat today are typically reared indoors in large sheds, crammed 17 or 18 to a square metre - the stench of ammonia hits you as soon as you open the door of one of these sheds... A study showed that 26 per cent of British birds are lame at slaughter, and they are also prone to heart failure, sores and blisters. Weakened in this manner and crammed together to make sure sufficient numbers are produced to make profits, the birds are susceptible to disease. Yet how much greater will be the concerns about chicken produced in Third World countries, where a drive for lower prices might create poor health and hygiene standards? Faced with such unpalatable possibilities, the £2 chicken suddenly looks a lot less appetising. Regardless of its alleged iconic status.

Vegetarianism is a popular choice for those whose personal politics extend to their diets. But "compassionate carnivores" see an option that allows them to eat meat without abandoning their principles, focusing on small farms with sustainable and humane practices. Some vegetarians, and those who have reduced their meat consumption because of their conscience or politics, are beginning to eat sustainable meat, choosing products that are not the result of industrial farming practices. "I was talking to this guy I know who said 'The grass-fed movement is the new vegetarianism'," said Alix Wall, a personal chef in the Bay Area of California.

The shift may be fueled in part by the popularity of Michael Pollan's best-seller "The Omnivore's Dilemma," which critiques industrial farming practices and celebrates small operations humanely raising livestock fed at pasture, with an eye to environmental protection and sustainability. The products of the smaller farms that Pollan extols appeal to some vegetarians who stopped eating meat because of concerns about the welfare of livestock, the environmental impact of meat production, or the health effects of eating factory-farmed meat. However, critics say that eating meat with a label implying sustainability or humane practices doesn't get around the fact that these animals are ultimately raised to be killed.

We'd like to take this opportunity to say something nice about the veal industry. Over the next 10 years, veal producers will replace the practice of tethering baby cows in tiny, solitary stalls with the kind of group-housing techniques that have been mandated in the European Union for more than a decade. Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, says this is "definitely in response to the Arizona initiative." In November, the state's voters banned veal crates and gestation crates for pregnant sows.

In explaining the change, the American Veal Association's resolution says "many large retail and food-service organizations now consider animal-welfare issues in concert with their purchasing" and "recent events indicate clearly that consumers of veal and other products derived from livestock expect the highest standards of animal welfare." The Republic editorial board has its share of unrepentant carnivores. Yet The Republic strongly supported Arizona's Humane Treatment of Farm Animals initiative because human beings have a responsibility to assure that even food animals are recognized as sentient beings with natural needs. Common decency demands that we treat them as creatures, not products. That is an increasingly mainstream view.

How many books have we read on healthy diets, the cruelty of factory farms and the devastation to the environment? All of them are necessary but never easy to read. So for a moment, take a break and read Evil Business by John F. Nienstedt. Evil Business is a light thriller entangled with tales spun around greedy corporations and the people who run them, trans fats, artificial sweeteners and meat analogs. And best of all, there is a happy, vegetarian ending.

The hero in the story, newspaper columnist Norman Fuller, is lured into adventures when he hears the "Voice of Evil." This voice, only heard by Fuller, seems to need Fuller's help in pursuing evil, while protecting Fuller every time he gets into serious trouble. Perhaps the "Voice of Evil" is not so evil after all. Evil Business is a work of fiction. Sadly, the evil that takes place in the story is taken from our current reality. The public needs to be made more aware of the evils in our food supply, motivated by corporate greed at the expense of our health and environment. Evil Business does this, in a fast moving, fun to read thriller. [Available from Amazon: Canada, U.S., UK.]

Don't worry about calling Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin a pair of skinny bitches. Just don't try to get them back on the double-bacon-and-cheeseburger diets of their youth. "We've been called a lot worse," giggles Freedman, who with her best friend Barnouin is co-author of Skinny Bitch, the snappiest-titled diet book on the market. Subtitled, "A no-nonsense, tough-love guide for savvy girls who want to stop eating crap and start looking fabulous," it features a drawing of a skinny young woman on the cover and a picture of the two skinny authors on the back.

Written in a flip, "hey girlfriend" style in which expletives are not spared and eating meat is denounced as the "dead, rotting, decomposing flesh diet," Skinny Bitch quickly became a word-of-mouth hit upon publication in December 2005. It all began four years ago when Barnouin, who had been converted by Freedman to a vegan diet, began insisting the two had to "change the world" and get people to eat better. [Available at Amazon: Canada, U.S., UK.]