I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why? To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm. … We eat too much meat in the west – too much for our own health and far too much for the welfare of the many millions of animals we raise for food.

You can read the rest of his account here.

Anecdotally, vegans and even vegetarians have a reputation for being anaemic and physically weak, and it may indeed be easier to become anaemic from iron deficiency on a poor quality vegetarian or vegan diet than on a poor quality diet featuring meat. However, no poor quality diet is good for health – poor quality meat-based diets may lead to other problems – so let’s restrict our focus to those who are more careful about what they eat. Can a vegan who eats well and keeps fit gain or maintain respectable functional strength for sports or health?

The answer, emphatically, is yes. What’s the evidence? Vegan athletes.

I recently discovered that Jon Hinds, who operates Monkey Bar Gymnasium – a gym whose website I’ve been using for exercise tips – is vegan. Moreover, he has made veganism a core component of Monkey Bar Gymnasium’s approach to health and fitness.

Jon’s no slouch, and neither is his vegan bodybuilder friend Mike Mahler. Here’s a video of them performing 56kg kettlebell snatches; Mike goes first (NSFW):

Read a little more about Mike Mahler and you’ll soon learn about one of his protégés: champion mixed martial arts fighter Mac Danzig, who is also vegan, and whose diet hasn’t prevented him beating a string of fearsome opponents in the ring.

But is that it? These three white men who move in the same circles? Of course not. There are notable vegan athletes of every shade and gender. Here are a couple of handy lists: at Wikipedia and at Best Vegan Guide.

So, if you’re considering a vegan diet, but you’re afraid it will leave you weak and puny, worry not. Just be sure to maintain a good intake of essential nutrients, and you may find, as Jon Hinds did, that you actually improve your performance! (Skip to 6:10 in the following video to see him discuss this.)

I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. … I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat. (Source)

Could this be true? Has the arch carnivore of the Western media – the man who notoriously ate the still-beating heart of a cobra on television – finally turned the corner?

Let’s be clear about one thing: Bourdain’s concern isn’t to alleviate the suffering of any species apart from human beings. In his limited personal quest to raise the quality of human life, he does, however, care about the food we eat, and this raises a valuable point: even for a person with such narrow concerns, it makes sense to pursue a diet in which animal flesh is eaten only on the condition that its quality is high. And if that means eating less animal flesh, this is a price he’s prepared to pay.

One of the purposes of Lowmeat.org is to publicise common ground. The strapline here is, For you, for livestock, for the planet. The great thing about a low meat diet is that even if you only pursue it for the sake of one member of that triumvirate, the evidence suggests you’ll benefit the others as well. That, at the risk of sounding corny, is a win-win situation! So thank you, Anthony, for caring about our diets – and for writing about them – whatever you may think about the rest.

But what can you cook to replace some or all of the turkey, goose, pigs in blankets, or other traditional festive dishes you might usually eat? Well, you could spend a while searching your cookbooks and the Web for suggestions – and doubtless you’d find some good ones – or you could give yourself a head start by jumping straight to the recipes linked from this article by Adharanand Finn.

There, moderation isn’t so difficult after all. Happy holidays, folks!