Sir, I wish to reply to Anne Dempsey's article of July 9th, "Fighting the Tyranny of Thinness There are a number of unsound causal connections in the article which could be very misleading.
The belief that vegetarians tend to be anamemic is common but this simply not true. Rigorous studies have consistently shown that they suffer less anaemia than do meat caters. Although meat is a source of iron, vegetables are actually a better source. So iron deficient are dairy products that you'd have to eat a lump of butter as big as your refrigerator to get as much iron as you would get from a bowl of broccoli. (Calorie for calorie, spinach has 14 times the iron of a sirloin steak).
Excess animal protein consumption, in fact, has been significantly connected to osteoporosis, heart disease, and bowel cancer. Theme are the results of scientific research. Such is the overwhelming evidence that excess animal proteins are, in tact, bad for you, that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has asked the Department of Agriculture in the US to drop meat, fish, poultry, eggs and milk products from the recommended daily allowances.
Sometimes vegetarian women think that perhaps they are not getting enough protein, so they over consume dairy products and thus may unknowingly eat their way into anaemia. The problem is often not lack of red meat, but the overeating of other iron deficient foods. Actually, the haemoglobin level (which reflects the amount of iron in the blood) of vegetarian's is consistently normal in many studies.
Long term studies show no iron deficiencies arising from a vegetarian diet. You can meet all your protein needs with a very ordinary (not exotic) vegetarian diet, you do not need animal protein to be healthy Ann editorial in the Lancet states. Formerly, vegetable proteins were classified as second class, and regarded as inferior to first class proteins of animal origin, but the distinction has now been generally discarded.
This, of course, is counter to what the National Dairy Council and the Meat Board would teach (but one could hardly expect Marlborough to teach us that cigarette smoking was harmful!).
I would wholeheartedly recommend that anyone interested in experimenting with a vegetarian diet, does so (also, cut out or limit junk food!). Yours, etc., Wellington Road, Dublin 4.