abc.net.au/science/news/anci … 081439.htm
I was most intrigued.
And no, I have not become a spam bot, bent on getting you all to look at adverts.
R
Certainly it would take a bit more effort to find anything important with your blade if your opponent was fat. I wonder how that balances against the loss of mobility. I assume we aren’t talking Sumo proportions here.
Geek, so being vegetarian does not make you slim? 
Still need to eat meat… 
It’s possible to be vegetarian and fat, just harder.
Maybe we should allow for fatness when designing games like NML etc - calculate your body mass index and make the likelihood of critical blows… 
it’s WAY possible to be veggie and fat, sorry. 
Depending on the sort of slim you want, most sports and figure models eat an unbelievable amount of meat and other proteins. Catwalk models… well, they don’t eat as far as i can tell 
Oh and Craig, re: body fat%… AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! lol, don’t think that’s gonna catch on, somehow
Interestingly enough I remember a similar kind of article I read way back which was about body builders being vegetarian. A few of the men who have won body building champs were vegetarian and many more go vege during training regeimes as it is the “perfect” diet for this kind of thing due to its ease of being a very low fat but high energy diet.
And isn’t it funny how some people STILL don’t think that being vegetarian is possible for humans! 
Unlike in the movies most of the time gladiators didn’t kill each other & weren’t necesarily trying to do so, so the fat was more likely about lessening the potential for serious injury, in what was most of the time just a really violent game.
This is a far cry from actual combat that say a soldier of the times would face, were your opponent is infact trying to kill you.
It would probably then make little difference in battle to whether you were hit in a critical spot or not by the amount of fat you had on board and would you really want to base a critical hit location system on their BMI anyways?
i.e. "hey you, you get an extra HP cause you’re fat"
Jared
I’ll just add for comment that most people in Rome were vegetarian most of the time. The only time they ate meat was from the animal sacrifice at a festival. Roman soldiers lived off bread and porridge, they’d eat meat if it was the only thing available, but they preferred grain as their staple.
woot!
Haha, given the choice, I’ve lived on bread and cheese many times, hasn’t done much for my figure tho
re: vegetarianism. it’s totally possible to be a vegetarian. I don’t know anyone who thinks it’s not possible.
it’s definitely possible to be a muscly vegetarian, it DOES tend to be a bit more complicated though. Most of the women (don’t know many male bodybuilders) I know have had to switch back to eating at least fish and eggs, I think that’s a form of veggie-ism, but I always think of fish as a kind of meat.
I like to take the road of complete apathy here. If you don’t like meat don’t eat it. If you do, then best of luck to you. There’s not much point in arguing past that.
Personally, I’ll take my steak blue and my duck with the skin on.
My late grandfather was a health/conscientious based vegetarian.
He honestly believed he could be more healthy by being vegatarian, and that all his health needs could be met by this lifestyle choice.
He was also a vegetarian because he didn’t believe animals should suffer or die when his food needs could be met with plant matter.
That being said he occasionally ate fish, as a supplement to his protein needs. He also ate dairy products and eggs. In his perception this was the lesser evil. In short he was a realist and acknowledged his needs.
I’ve met vegans, no animal products eaten at all. Lots of them struggle to stay healthy because its much harder to get all you need only from veges. Thats not to say it can’t be done.
Personally I’m omnivorous & try to eat a relatively healthy diet bar the typical human failings.
I believe in the case of the gladiators diet, some of this is down to the availability of foodstuffs, meat has not always been the commodity it is today. Some ancient cultures also understood the importance of diet & this is apparent in this discussion.
I feel I should have an end point right here but I don’t have one.
Jared
Well, now you do, grrr 
I’ve got an idea some time ago to try to switch to vegetarianism, because it’s healthy, and has vitamins, etc., etc., etc.
I’ve tried many times, and usually failed after a day or two. My body just required MEAT so badly that I couldn’t think of anything else. I came to the idea that for some people it’s just totally impossible to live with no meat.
Still, maybe it has nothing to do with that, maybe it’s just like a habit for chocolate, you don’t really need it but you feel as you do… Meat is a yammy thing, after all…
I still didn’t abandon hope. I think there are some vegetarian products that can give you same elements as meat, like rice, beans, and something else, not sure what exactly.
Well, eggs are nice too. And cheese.
deep thoughts
The fact that gladiators were vegetarians and still were able to fight gives me hope
I have a friend who is vegetarian for the last ten years, and she seems like a totally happy with her food person. I work with guy who is a strickt vegetarian his whole life, and he is a very smart guy.
Seems like vegetarianism makes no harm, but gives some advantages, ne?
I will try again…
I deleted my first post because it was stupid.
I think what is interesting is what this article “does not say”, For instance it makes the statement that the test are designed to find out what foods the subject ate “During thier lifetime” I am pretty sure the subjects were not Gladiators for thier entire lives.
this begs the question were the subjects Fat before they became gladiators and does not answer how long they were gladiators for, Five days, five years, five minutes.
Also it states they were “Mostly Slaves” and this makes me wonder what kind of food slaves were fed, I suspect there was not much in the way of meat, even during festival times.
And relying on body fat for protection is not a good idea, and having fat on your legs and neck is not going to protect you at all. The next time you are cutting up a steak see how much resistance the fat gives to a sharp knife, and then keep in mind that a sword is a truck load heavier and is travelling a whole lot faster.
As an aside The Retarius was armed with a Net, Dagger and Trident, and the only extra armour gladiators wore was on the sword arm and prime leg and apart from a helmet that was it. (I know this from my training with the gladiator school that is part of the 2nd Legion Augusta)
a lot of the gladiators were not professional athletes but rather the majority were just some poor bastard who had been handed a weapon for the first time in thier lives five minutes before stepping in the arena and told “best of luck pal, try not to die too quickly”
Nuts, tempah, tofu, falafel, and those many meat-substitute products you can buy these days like vege sausages - some of which aren’t bad. For that matter, there is also protein powder (made from whey or soy), which is quite nice in a milkshake.
If you’re not going vegan, then dairy and eggs provide a lot of protein too.
I missed the protein until I found ways to substitute it, but once I got into a new pattern it was easy. I’m happier not eating animals… it just doesn’t seem in their best interests, and I can’t find decent logic to rationalise why their interests are all less important than people’s.
I’d feel less hypocritical if I could do without leather and so on, but veganism is such a big commitment in such an animal-product based world as we live in. It gets in everywhere. Rennet in cheese, wine filtered through animal products, hooves in your makeup, leather parts in so many products, and so on. So I settle for doing what I can without going seriously out of my way, but I’d be happier if there was a general shift in thinking on this.
Personally, I am ethically opposed to vegaterianism. Humans have the teeth of omnivores, and our bowels are not well adapted to digest large amounts of cellulose, but more to the point, do you really think that yummy but stupid animals like cows, sheep and chickens would be around in such numbers if they weren’t farmed? They would probably be endangered or even extinct. Pigs and goats, being somewhat more clever, would probably be ok.
I have a friend who believe that the only ethical waty to go about this is don’t eat any thing you personally aren’t prepared to kill. Which leaves me in the clear as an omnivire 
.
I guess reaching a particular degree of hunger would make most of people kill anything, not even cow to eat but someone on two legs too.
By the way, I’ve heard that human meat would be the best one for humans because it contains all elements the body need (since it’s taken from a very similar body), and requires less time and efforts from the organism to digest.
I like meat
About not eating what you are not prepared to kill…
How about not eating what you are personally not [color=red]able [/color]to kill? Have you ever tried to approach “stupid” sheep? It bloody runs away! That means you’ll have to chase it, catch it, and then kill (unless you can do it on the run 
).
That brings us to “only eat what you personally can get”, that’s how it was in ancient times.
Ah, and you can’t eat chocolate unless you’ve grown it yourself!!!
In fact, even in those ancient times people hunted in groups. So it’s not a personal business of one man or woman to get the food.
I think people should eat what feels good for them. I would probably not being able to kill a little yellow cheeping chicken, however, when coming home after a whole day spent in Uni, studying hard and having no food at all, I don’t care how cute the chicken is. I crave for MEAT, so I eat it.
I pretty much envy people who can live ok without meat, and I’m still trying to join them, not sure how much I can succeed.
But eggs - yeah, that’s good, and cheese as well.
By the way, I can totally understand why many people think it’s very cruel and bad to kill animals for their fur, but believe a Russian, when you stay outside in [color=blue]minus 25 degrees[/color], it’s much better to have a fur coat rather than synthetic something. So the context of each person’s life also makes difference.
been there, done that - Dad’s sheep come to the call, which makes them really easy to kill and means no nasty adrenaline to make the meat tough
[quote=“Aiwe”]
By the way, I can totally understand why many people think it’s very cruel and bad to kill animals for their fur, but believe a Russian, when you stay outside in [color=blue]minus 25 degrees[/color], it’s much better to have a fur coat rather than synthetic something. So the context of each person’s life also makes difference.[/quote]
Have you heard of eco-fur? In NZ rabbits and possums are both introduced specise which wreak terrible damage on the environment. It is considered ecologically friendly to wear rabbit or possum fur.
So anything that humans appear evolved for is what we are ethically required to do? Like waging wars for example… that seems to be something we’re very well evolved for given our track record.
I’d be happy for there to be fewer of them around. Especially given that they contribute more greenhouse gases than all the world’s vehicles put together, including planes. Modern farming is not sustainable, it’s killing the planet.
Why waste 9/10ths of a crop’s food value by filtering it through a cow? Why not just eat the crop (not eating the grass, but by growing something else there instead)? Because animals taste good. When all said and done, it boils down to hedonism vs. humanitarianism.
My favourite novel is Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear”. Definitely worth a read (accepting that it IS a novel, but with 30 pages or so of scientific refs at the back… which you don’t HAVE to read)
In case you were wondering about the apparent change of subject, he’s a very intelligent fellow (in spite of Jurassic Park), with some very interesting things to say about the so-called “Global Warming Crisis”.
And I agree with Telpe, has anyone else noticed that almost the only animals on the planet NOT becoming endangered are the ones we “need”. Maybe we should set up whale farms… would make the Japanese people happy. I suppose Greenpeace would see that as highly unethical, but I can guarantee they wouldn’t be extinct!