Are INTPs more likely to be vegetarian/vegan?

[reprographist]

I didn't see another thread like this, so I hope I'm not repeating a question.

So how many of you are veggies?

 

[RubberDucky451]

You're not repeating a question, but I posted a question vaguely similar to yours.

http://www.intpforum.com/showthread.php?t=3960&highlight=eating+healthy

I think INFPs are more prone towards becoming vegetarian or vegan.

 

[Adymus]

Maybe not Vegans/Veggies per se, but I've noticed quite a few INTPs are very nutrition conscious... Which is weird to me, because I barely care at all about what I put in my body.

 

[reprographist]

Maybe not Vegans/Veggies per se, but I've noticed quite a few INTPs are very nutrition conscious... Which is weird to me, because I barely care at all about what I put in my body.

Makes sense. I'm always trying to eat healthy and such, but that tends to not work out.

@ducky
I didn't think about INFPs being more likely, but I see it now. I'm vegetarian, but I'm considering going back to a regular (but healthier) diet.

 

[Claverhouse]

I shouldn't think they are more than other types. The reasons either ethical or nuitritional for choosing one regime over any other are kinda universal.


I've been a vegan a long time, and a vegetarian since about 6 years old. However, like Adymus I'm not interested in food per se. If I were it might be more difficult --- and it is already difficult.

Healthwise it has never made much difference: there are undoubted gains from avoiding crap and probable losses from nutrients, but general health as opposed to fitness and any inevitable decline all endure downhill from 22 is normal enough for me to rarely consider sickness.




Claverhouse

 

[Trebuchet]

Yeah, I'm fascinated by nutrition, and so are two other INTPs I know. I was a vegetarian (lacto-ovo) for about 13 years, but I'm not now. I still enjoy a vegetarian meal, though.

Even when I was vegetarian, I didn't have any moral reasons for it. I just didn't like the taste, texture, or though of eating meat. I still don't like the thought, so I try not to think about it.

The most annoying thing about being vegetarian was all the annoying vegetarians, who would moralize at people. So if I sat down with someone who ate meat, they would get all defensive and figure I was going to lecture them, too.

 

[WorkInProgress]

I wrote a few sentences for my reply before realizing that this sums up my stance pretty well-

YouTube- Louis CK's Justification For Meat Consumption

 

[Anthile]

Bismarck once said, "The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night."
I recommend everyone to visit a meat factory to see how that stuff is made. Quite a few people I know did that and they became vegetarians out of pure disgust.

Personally, I'm a vegetarian for about two years now and I haven't even caught a cold in about three years.

 

[Dormouse]

I'll become vegetarien as soon as they figure out how to make tofu bacon.

Actually, I'm pretty nutrition conscious already, and tend to avoid 'real' meat in favour of fish.

 

[Hawkeye]

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.

I'm not a vegetarian myself but I'm also not happy about the methods most of the animals are slaughtered by.

Forcing myself to become a vegetarian won't change this matter however.

 

[reprographist]

I'll become vegetarien as soon as they figure out how to make tofu bacon.

Actually, I'm pretty nutrition conscious already, and tend to avoid 'real' meat in favour of fish.

I found tofu bacon at HEB (:
No more excuses.

 

[Fool]

I'm not vegetarian. I do try to eat relatively healthy, but the munchies get the best of me once in a while.

 

[Agent Intellect]

Why are people making the assumption that eating meat is not healthy? I'm glad our ancestors ate meat, or we'd probably either be tossing shit at each other right now or extinct.

It's the food chain, dammit:

 

[fullerene]

I had a friend who's bio majoring (pre-med) right now, and she said that the more she learned about our digestive systems, the less healthy eating meat (as opposed to vegetables) sounded to her. Sadly we didn't have time to talk about it then, and I haven't spoken to her in quite a few months, so I'm not sure what made her think that. If I can find and get an answer out of her, though, I'll relay anything she learned. It works fine (obviously), but I think she said it did some questionable stuff to your digestive system that vegetables don't.

I've recently started liking vegetables, quite a bit... which is weird, because meat has been the vast majority of my diet (80%+) for about 12 years now. Before that I was primarily a grains person. Recently, steak just started tasting "blegh" all of a sudden, and I had some vegetarian meals that were far better than anything else I've had. I think I just got too much of the more "tasteless" stuff when I was younger (cucumbers, lettuce, carrots), and not much of the more flavorful ones (spinach, peppers, jalepinos). My favorite meal at the moment is actually a sandwich at a nearby health-food place which has those three, along with a lot of brie cheese and one or two other crunchy things (I'm not even really sure what's in it).

It's definitely not because I'm health-conscious, and I still dislike most vegetables, but they're starting to grow on me.

 

[Agent Intellect]

I had a friend who's bio majoring (pre-med) right now, and she said that the more she learned about our digestive systems, the less healthy eating meat (as opposed to vegetables) sounded to her. Sadly we didn't have time to talk about it then, and I haven't spoken to her in quite a few months, so I'm not sure what made her think that. If I can find and get an answer out of her, though, I'll relay anything she learned. It works fine (obviously), but I think she said it did some questionable stuff to your digestive system that vegetables don't.

It's because a lot of undercooked (ie red) meat is difficult to digest and will become lodged in the colon, where it will begin to rot. The human digestive system has evolved to digest cooked meat (the proteins in cooked meat are denatured and much easier to digest). Vegetables are made primarily of cellulose which is a type of hydrophilic fiber that aids in passing food through the intestines.

 

[Anthile]

Damn you, crypt! I'm hungry now.

 

[jachian]

Im not a vegetarian per se, but If i can avoid eating meat I do.

I try not to eat meat. The problem is that I play sports and I need that kind of protein to rebuild..... So I do when i have a heavy work out.

Otherwise I try to stay clear.

Actually i've always hated meat...... even when I was a child I would eat everything else on my plate except the meat.

I dont know..... I've never really liked flesh that much.

 

[KazeCraven]

I am vegetarian, but the only person in my immediate family that doesn't avoid eating meat is my INTP brother. He, however, would eat any animal (barring humans) if he thought it would taste good.

While I'm thinking about it, for those who eat meat, do you think that eating dog meat (or cat meat, or other animal-that-is-usually-a-pet meat) is wrong? Rather, would you be adverse to eating, or seeing others eat, dogs or cats that were not pets of other people? (Those are perhaps two totally different questions for some people.) I seem to get a lot of resistance over this issue, with most people saying that those who eat dogs don't know any better.

I always thought that was a clear inconsistency of belief, though I have heard mildly good reasons for this seeming inconsistency.

I'm also fairly certain that factory-farmed meat is unhealthy, which is what most meat-eaters eat, due to the diet and lifestyle of the animals in question (standing in their own feces; getting injected with antibiotics). Disagreement?

 

[Claverhouse]

Why are people making the assumption that eating meat is not healthy? I'm glad our ancestors ate meat, or we'd probably either be tossing shit at each other right now or extinct.

It's because a lot of undercooked (ie red) meat is difficult to digest and will become lodged in the colon, where it will begin to rot.

Well, our ancestors who first moved from a non-meat diet --- and thus apparently engendered larger, better brains* leading to the wonder that is us --- would have necessarily eaten uncooked meat, however unhealthy that might be. And that would have mainly been friends and family ( like our cousins, particularly as there wouldn't have been large enough enemy tribes at such a period... not as a sustainable reserve herd of meat-animals ) until large enough tools were fashioned to kill larger animals.

Not that I am suggesting they always killed their fellows, in most primitive tribes cannibalism often consists of eating those dead of natural causes, waiting long enough to make sure they are truly not moving anymore, from respect; mass killing for food was more usual in semi-advanced civilisations such as the Maya and Aztec etc..

We may assume that humans were then agile enough to capture darting mice and rats and eat them raw [ possibly alive ] but these could never be anything more than fast food on the go.


*

Spoiler

Around 1.5 million years ago there was “a lot going on” in evolutionary terms, said Aiello. Hominid habitat changed, along with the size of early human craniums (larger) and jaws (smaller).

But growing brain size presented a metabolic problem. A gram of brain tissue takes 20 times more energy to grow and maintain than a gram of tissue from the kidney, heart, or liver, she said. Gut tissue is metabolically expensive too — so as brains grew gut sizes shrank.

It’s likely that meat eating “made it possible for humans to evolve a larger brain size,” said Aiello. Early human ancestors probably consumed more animal foods — termites and small mammals – than the 2 percent of carnivorous caloric intake associated with chimpanzees.

The social implications of increased meat eating were interesting, said Aiellio. In most primates, there’s no food sharing between females and offspring, she said. But the difficulty of getting meat led to cooperative food sharing among early humans, strengthening the bond between a female and her offspring.

Increased meat eating also likely led to an increased division of labor between the sexes, said Aiello. The males would hunt and provide; the females — faced with more intensive motherhoods — would raise the hominid young, who were dependent longer than ape infants.

This too is funny ( not least the magnificent imprecision of scientists giving a definite date of between 500,000 and 1,700,000 years; but those who put their trust in scientific fact never get that particular joke).

Spoiler

The second stage of advancement occurred around 1.7 million to 500,000 years ago when our hominid ancestors gathered their stone tools and took the risk of hunting big game.

Now, one must question whether they did this to supplement their existing diet of plants and small animals, or did they give all that up for the big stuff? It is still too early to tell how these slowly evolving big-game hunters are doing with their fully evolved brains as compared to their small-game-hunter ancestors, who took what seem to have been forever to get it together to hunt big game.

With the theory of slow, gradual ascension from apes to modern humans entrenched in our textbooks, it is no wonder that the image of the lumbering Paleolithic brute is so well established in people’s minds, even though most paleoanthropologists today are doing their best to change this conditioning. This is likely to remain a difficult challenge as long as the theory responsible for this image has not changed.

At this point, we have a hypothetical historical situation in which our earliest ancestors consume mostly fruits, insects, and occasionally small animals as a regular diet, much as apes and chimps do today. Then, according to theory, 2.2 to 2.5 million years ago a special line of hominids evolves. These new hominids have to learn to spot predators hiding in the tall grasses of the savanna in Africa. Since they no longer live in trees, they begin standing upright in order to see over the tall savanna grasses, and are the first species to become truly bipedal.

But hang on. Have you ever actually seen the tall grasses of the savanna? Even standing on someone’s shoulders and looking out over the tall grasses of the savanna, one would be hard pressed to spot a low-crouching, camouflaged lion. Anyone giving this idea even a little commonsense thought can see the absurdity of it.

Anyway, whatever meat they ate then was not force-filled with steroids and hormones...




Claverhouse

 

[NeverAmI]

Not a vegetarian. If I ever did become one it would be due to health or political reasons, probably not ethical.

I didn't start watching my nutrition until I got really fat, then I started paying attention.

 

[Cogito]

I've been slightly vegan (I still eat eggs every so often) for approximately three years. I undertook this diet because:

1) I believe factory farming should not be practiced. I have nothing against carnivorism, though.

2) To increase my sense of self-control, something I unfortunately lack.

It's been extremely--and surprisingly--easy to maintain, so far.

 

[intuitivet]

Yeah, I'm fascinated by nutrition, and so are two other INTPs I know. I was a vegetarian (lacto-ovo) for about 13 years, but I'm not now. I still enjoy a vegetarian meal, though.

Even when I was vegetarian, I didn't have any moral reasons for it. I just didn't like the taste, texture, or though of eating meat. I still don't like the thought, so I try not to think about it.

The most annoying thing about being vegetarian was all the annoying vegetarians, who would moralize at people. So if I sat down with someone who ate meat, they would get all defensive and figure I was going to lecture them, too.

I'm pretty much vegetarian for the same reasons as you were. I eat chicken and other poultry very rarely, but generally hate meat and fish (although I'm trying to eat more fish for the oils - oh no! Nutrition fascination D: )
I also dislike those who push their morals on others.
Oh and the only real vegetarian (except occasionally) I know is an INFP. The others eat fish.

 

[maggie]

I am vegetarian, I believe INTPs are more likely to think about what they eat, where it comes from and the impact of eating it so they probably are more likely to not eat meat that is just my opinion though seeing as I don’t know any INTPs other than myself .

 

[Deckard]

Are INTPs more likely to be vegetarian/vegan?

Quite possibly! Vegetarianism is correlated with higher IQs (link), IQ seems to be most strongly correlated with iNuitiveness (link), and INTPs are statistically the second most likely type to be "gifted" (link). My anecdotal experience here and on INTPcentral also suggests that there are a high proportion of INTP veg*ans.

Why are people making the assumption that eating meat is not healthy?

It's more than an assumption. Perhaps you are just unaware of the arguments / science? The statement "eating meat is not healthy" could do with some qualifications, though - obviously it's partially true and partially untrue.

I think a statement that can be more confidently made is "vegetarianism is a good choice for maintaining health". It's been shown in studies that vegetarians have significantly longer lifespans (and lower risk of cardio problems, cancer, etc.) than omnivores.

I'm glad our ancestors ate meat, or we'd probably either be tossing shit at each other right now or extinct.

Maybe so, but how relevant is that to our choices, now?

It's the food chain, dammit:

Getting into naturalistic fallacy territory there.

 

[Minuend]

Quite possibly! Vegetarianism is correlated with higher IQs (link)

I can believe that, because most people do what they've always done. Intelligent people are able to consider new things, though unusual. When my sister turned vegetarian, "everybody" was against her. Though, their reasons for being so were unclear. She started eating meat again because of the constant haggling from everybody. She's not that good with blocking other people out even though she thinks she's right. Pity.

I kinda want to be a vegetarian, but I hate cooking. When I live by myself, I don't eat much at all. I rather go hungry for while than make something. I believe I would have to plan ahead a little if I wanted to be a vegetarian. Also, since I live rurally, there's not really much food to choose from to begin with. And a a lot of normal food contain meat extracts. I don't eat chicken, I think they suffer the most. Cows and sheep get to be out a lot during summer, at least. Main reason for me eating meat is probably my laziness.

I suppose, generally, I'm more fond of animals than humans. Animals are fascinating, humans are just annoying.

 

[emiiee]

vegetarian!! I'm planning on being a vegan as soon as I move out

 

[Words]

No thank you. I enjoy my meat for it is what's on my plate. There is no need to be picky.

Food is not such an important issue...somewhat like hygiene and tidiness.

 

[Jah]

Mostly Vegetarian.
I avoid meat, first because it seems unnecessary and harmful in large doses. Our body is much better off with just vegetables, pulses etc. and meat only in small doses, not as a basis for nutrition.
But if meat's the dish served, I will eat alongside the others, though I would probably not cook it unless there was a special occasion, or no better alternative.

Another aspect is the self-control/mastery bit.

Thus: My main motivations for vegetarianism is self control and maintenance of stable, good health.
I do consider that all living beings should be respected, and I cannot justify anybody eating meat that they haven't killed themselves.

Ethically, eggs may be accepted, since this is possible without killing the animal, symbiosis I believe is the word.

There's also the question of energy efficiency.
Meat is generally less energy efficient, and thus less sustainable in a fair and balanced existence here on earth. 1 pound of meat demands approx 10 pounds of other foods like grain.

Ethically, reasonably, pathologically and practically, meat seems not justifiable as anything but luxury.


It does seem that Vegetarianism comes easier to INFP.
INTPs only choosing vegetarian diets on the basis of reason, thus not developing the "gag-effect" in the vicinity of meat (which some vegetarians do).

 

[LifeLine]

Funny, I hate vegatables. Yet, I feel guilt when I eat meat because the death of said meat-animal was most likely painful and unnessecary. A lot of the meat you put in your mouth is garbage, but if you stay away from pig and for the most part cow, you're doing pretty well. Things like fish and chicken can be very good for your body.

I'm not either of what the OP listed, but I have contemplated it before, mostly for moral reasons. If I were to be either, I'd be a vegan, since being a vegetarian still means getting milk and eggs from animals. The problem is that it can be so hard to find cheap vegan alternatives to things like milk and eggs. Not to mention that most vegetables disgust me.

 

[Deckard]

The problem is that it can be so hard to find cheap vegan alternatives to things like milk and eggs.

I thought this would be the case when I went from vegetarian to vegan. But it really isn't. The only way you'll know for sure is to try it out for a while. Milk and eggs are totally unnecessary when it comes to cooking, and eating cheaply.

Personally I was a cheese lover, so giving that up was the hardest. There are vegan substitutes, but they are inferior. But I pay this price willingly - the suffering caused by the dairy industry vastly outweighs this difference in pleasure.

Not to mention that most vegetables disgust me.

I accept that tastes are individual, but I can't help but think that you just haven't encountered the vast majority of awesome vege dishes that are out there. And it's not just about veges - the vegan diet incorporates a variety of nuts, grains, legumes and fruit. I suggest buying a cheap steamer and finding some easy-to-make sauces for your veges. Steamed vegetables can be cheap, healthy and tasty.

Going vegan will force you to to branch out, but that's a good thing. You will be accommodated, and you will discover a lot of new things you've never tried before. And most of it will be healthy.

 

[Cogito]

No thank you. I enjoy my meat for it is what's on my plate. There is no need to be picky.

Food is not such an important issue...somewhat like hygiene and tidiness.

The sustainability of your physical body. . . is not important?

 

[Jah]

Not if the mind is somehow not affected by the state of the physical body ?

(I once got the question by a yogi "You want to eat dead body?" with true surprise in his voice)