Howard,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts; yes, I mentioned soy. I also mentioned SMALL quantites as large amounts of soy in the diet can cause impairment with the thyroid gland.

As for whey protein isloates, I will disagree with you. I lost my father-in-law and mother-in-law to cancer and both of my parents have managed to survive cancer. They all were health-concious eaters.

I personally cannot eat a lot of meat - I ate tons when I first started Atkins. This is MY choice and MY opinion about whey protein isolates.

Will I die of cancer before I'm 60? My genetics say YES, very likely; however, I have to male choices that work for me. I want to enjoy my life and be as healthy as possible. I'm losing weight, feel great and can see 178 lbs as an attainable goal for the first time in my life.

I'm willing to take my chances with "processed junk" for now. I will read your links; I think having information is very useful in making good decisions.

I ate free-range as a child as I was raised on a farm. My parents eat free-range and have for ALL of their 76 years - they still got cancer.

My Dad is a type II diabetic because he likes sweets; my Mom does not like sweets so there were very few in the house.

There are no GUARANTEES - you have to make choices in life.

BTW, we have free range meats and eggs available -I will agree that TASTE ALONE is a huge motivator - if the kids and family will eat them then I'm happy!

Our plan is to move away from commercially processed meats - see, we can agree on something!

Tom.

Belatedly...that penguin link was disgusting. 805.1

2c worth: no one lives their lives to absolute moral principles. It isn't possible. There almost never perfect actions and rarely good solutions. We live a life of least bad actions. So - yes I eat meat, but am not fully comfortable with it. When the wallet's full, I eat free range. I try promote good, humane farming practices.

Let me throw yet ANOTHER spanner in the works. Consider the proposition that being tasty to humans can be an evolutionary survival strategy.
This doesn't apply to Hunter-gather societies (ask the mammoths and moas). But animals that humans take an interest in domesticating have vastly improved survival rates and numbers. Indeed we seem to be heading towards a VERY limited ecosystem, one totally dominated by meat animals and pets.

It has been suggested that if we were really concerned about protecting the existence of pandas and gorillas we should start farming them for meat on a commercial basis. Why do I raise this subject?

Merely to suggest that 'benefit' and 'humane' need to be qualified.

As to the health issues, if our history shows us anything it is our amazing adaptability to a range of environments andd food sources. I don't get too hung up about it.

Can't see where the hostility to vegetarians comes from - what's to disapprove of in that personal choice? (Of course, if someone was trying to FORCE the same choice on me...)

WOW, Ian-we are really going to disagree here. A lot.

Lots of animals that were tasty to humans went extinct or almost extinct because of us. Ask the buffalo. Ask the do do. Plus the fact unless you want to consider us Natural Selection, that isn't an evolutionary strategy anyway. Why do we define everything in terms of human use or human adaptibility anyway? How speciescentric are we? Why can't we try to protect the gorilla and panda because we should do it, not because it will benefit or not benefit us in any way?

Actually I doubt we do disagree and if we do we're friends right?
BTW I hope you saw the end of my post, I was editing as you posted.

I certainly agree about human's driving tasty animals into extinction, that why I excepted Hunter-Gather activities. Interesting to speculate that we may have ended up killing MORE species if we had NOT agrarianised and industrialised (Rubbish, of course. We would not have been successful enough to have had the same population pressures).

Also you're right about speciescentric attitutes. That's why I DO see the activities of humans as being part of the natural selection process.
Strange, perverse, unique and horribly destructive as we are - we are part of the natural order. Our effect on other species might be the same as that of a natural catastrophe, but it still promotes adaptation (think of the change in the size of elephant tusks over the last century because we weeded out all the really big tuskers. Big tusks became an anti-survival trait).
At the same time we are encountering/causing mass extinction, we are also seeing (as in other M.E.s) a flurry of adaptive processes to cope with US.

This, in a strange catch-22 way is part of the problem - and the irony. It is our unique level of sapience which allows us to ask the qustion, 'What SHOULD we be doing' and ask it as a moral question as well as utilitarian.

I think you can imagine that I am actually passionate about preserving bio-diversity and our maybe-sapient cousins especially. But it is our biologically inherited attitudes which endanger these species and also our evolved traits of empathy which may preserve them.