If we look around nature it sure looks like the carnivores have an intellectual advantage over herbivores. It makes sense though. After all, how smart do you have to be to eat grass? In one way, I think it may even turn out that the plants are perhaps a little smarter than the animals who eat them (More on that in a minute).
OK, we all know that you will probably never see a bomb sniffing cow at the airport. But, what does this have to do with people? More specifically, what does it have to do with the sizes of brains between meat eaters and vegetarians? Well, as it turns out, being a vegetarian may actually shrink your brain.
About 3 years ago some scientists at Oxford University published the results of a test they had conducted on vitamin B12 and brain size. They didn't set out to alarm vegetarians, it just sort of turned out that way.
They started out with a group of people ages 61 to 87. They gave them physicals, memory tests and brain scans. They also did blood tests to measure their vitamin B12 levels.
5 years later they performed the same tests on this group. The people with the lowest level of B12 had a 6 times more chance of brain shrinkage than those with higher B12 levels.
Since the best sources of B12 are from fish and meat, these scientists recommended including them in your diet as a preventative measure. Below is a link in case you are interested in reading this study for yourself.
While it's difficult to get much B12 in a vegetarian diet, it's not impossible. You can eat a lot of tofu. Tofu is made from fermented soy bean curd and contains quite a bit of B12. There is, however, a disadvantage. This is where I think the plant world really shines.
Plants don't particularly like to be eaten either. Since they can't run, hide or aggressively fight back, they have developed various other defense systems. Some have thorns, some taste bad, some are poisonous, and some (like the soy bean plant) have phytoestrogens.
Personally, I think this is the most interesting defense mechanism of all. Phytoestrogens are actually an herbivore birth control. It's the plants way of controlling the herbivore population. "Phyto" means plant and estrogens are a female animal hormone. What happens when a male herbivore ingests a lot of female hormones? It's not just his brain that shrinks. His libido is decreased and his sperm count goes down.
Now, I'm not saying that if you eat a lot of soy products your tallywhacker is going to shrink, your sperm count will drop or that you won't be interested in sex. I'm just saying that the soy bean plant has an interesting defense system and that meatalso contains a huge amount of B12 without the phytoestrogens.
I'm sure the vegetarians of the world might have something to say about this research. So please feel free to leave a comment.
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