Hoping this is still kind of on topic, but I just spent the month of October taking a 30-day vegan challenge as a promotional tie in for a new book at our store.  While it was hard for me to eat enough food (a problem I have no matter what my diet), I found one very important result, and that was an improvement in my mood.  Going back on the omnivore's diet I noticed stress much more frequently.  I noticed it because it kept producing an aggressive response.  On the vegan diet, that didn't happen.  Either my stress response was so subtle I didn't notice it or I didn't have as much stress to begin with.

The reason I went on the vegan challenge was to take a month and think about my body and my diet.  It wasn't health so much as political -- the idea that 7 billion people are going to be able to eat Egg McMuffins, Big Macs, and Chicken Strips three times a day is ridiculous.  Until those freaks at MIT come up with meat protein you can grow in a vat, we are stuck with the system we have.  The more demand there is for meat, the more concentrated and monocultural the production of it will become, and the more it will require antibiotics, hormones, supplements, and, eventually, lobotomies or piggy Prozac.  The more concentrated the production, the more stressed the animals are.  It's not unreasonable to think that when you eat meat, you are eating the animal's history, whether it's pastoral or industrial.

Now I'm just trying to get the balance right.  My body loves burning the heavy fuel, but I have to watch the emissions.