i actually eat very little meat.

by weight, i'm guessing that my diet would be over 50% fruit, 10% dairy (cheese, ice cream), 10% vegetables and with the balance being mostly grains - including a lot of soy milk, both in daily smoothies and in the perpetually suckling cup of coffee.

i eat eggs once or twice a week, usually once, which works out to 4-8 eggs a week - usually four. it's about every five days or so.

at this point, i'm still technically a vegetarian. and, i kind of wish i was, but my doctor told me when i was a kid that i need a little red meat.

the idea that you can just take vitamins is wrong. the studies on this are conclusive; it's about absorption, and you just can't absorb a lot of what you get in the fortified foods, or b-complexes. see, and this is the fundamental flaw with veganism - they don't study what your body can actually use. they just look at charts and come to wrong conclusions from them.

take flax seed, for instance. it's actually useless to you - your body can't do a damned thing with it. there's lots of stuff in it that your body would like to be able to use, but it simply just doesn't understand the chemistry required to actually use it. so, it just passes right through. that's not what they told you, is it?

that said, i don't buy raw meat. ever. it's not allowed in the house, under any circumstance. so, you'll never see me buy anything like hamburger, or a ham - or even a turkey. the only meat i will ever purchase is pre-cooked, and i'll microwave it before i touch it, just to make sure.

i'll sometimes buy a pre-cooked bird around thanksgiving (i prefer pizza for christmas, and i generally don't celebrate easter at all). and, i'll get a burger at a fast food restaurant once in a while.

but, the only meat i buy habitually is salami - which tends to get groans. isn't that the worst?

it could be. you're not thinking about this right, though.

see, your body is concerned about total inputs, not relative ones. so, the only reason a tomato is better for you than a chocolate bar is due to the concentration of the sugar - the chocolate bar is just too much. but, you could flip it around the other way, too. a little bit of chocolate is like eating a lot of tomatoes, so if you could fortify the chocolate, it would be a wash.

this is basically thinking like an astronaut. that's what they do with their high tech space food - they condense everything into a few bites.

so, the question of whether salami is actually bad for you or not reduces to how much of it you eat. because salami is highly concentrated, eating a small amount of it is equivalent to eating much more of something else. it follows that if you're also concerned about calories, it makes more sense to eat a little bit of salami than a lot of chicken. you just have to be strict about it.

i just want to add that salami isn't hot dogs. it's not really a processed meat, in that sense. think of it like this: hot dogs are 70% corn starch, but salami is actually 70% meat.