Does trying to live healthy make sense considering an imminent bird flu outbreak?

[Astreja]

Could it be that vegetarians tend to care about hygiene more and thus have been infected with fewer types of germs in their lifetime?

Two things:

• If you've spent any time at all cooking meals from scratch, you should be aware that meat preparation requires more stringent adherence to hygiene protocols.  In particular, whenever I've just worked with raw chicken I immediately wash down the cutting board, knife, kitchen shears or whatever tools I've been using (very hot soapy water) and never use unwashed tools for other ingredients.
  
• It's impossible to quantify the number and variety of germs any individual has been infected with - for every one pathogen that makes someone ill, they could have been exposed to a thousand more that never manifested in symptoms.  As a general rule, though, someone who hasn't encountered many types of germs has a relatively untrained immune system and is more vulnerable to unfamiliar organisms.
  

[Spongebob]

I remember reading a book about the amazing health benefits of consuming antioxidants to eliminate free radicals in your system back in the late 80's. 30 years later, the scientific consensus still says the results are inconclusive. The consensus doesn't say that because of some bias toward junk food or against the eating of certain fruits & vegetables. It's because when studies are done properly, they eliminate all sorts of noise and sometimes the signal for conclusive evidence is really small or even absent. These have to be repeated with different populations to filter out any data that may contaminate the final conclusion.

[Anomalocaris]

since you will absolutely most certainly die,  does it really make sense not to step in front of speeding trains?

I mean avoiding speeding trains just increase your chances of dying in more prolonged and painful ways, right?

[Ranjr]

I read where vegan dieters die more painfully.

[Spongebob]

Could it be that vegetarians tend to care about hygiene more and thus have been infected with fewer types of germs in their lifetime?

Two things:

• If you've spent any time at all cooking meals from scratch, you should be aware that meat preparation requires more stringent adherence to hygiene protocols.  In particular, whenever I've just worked with raw chicken I immediately wash down the cutting board, knife, kitchen shears or whatever tools I've been using (very hot soapy water) and never use unwashed tools for other ingredients.
  
• It's impossible to quantify the number and variety of germs any individual has been infected with - for every one pathogen that makes someone ill, they could have been exposed to a thousand more that never manifested in symptoms.  As a general rule, though, someone who hasn't encountered many types of germs has a relatively untrained immune system and is more vulnerable to unfamiliar organisms.
  

I wouldn't expect meat to carry more germs necessarily, but rather a different variety than most vegetables.  However, due to the way vegetables are grown, processed and packaged nowadays, we often see outbreaks of things like e coli with lettuce.  So, unless you grow your own garden, you can't assume vegetables are clean.

[The Grand Nudger]

It would be hard to imagine how my vegetarian friends managed to catch fewer germs in their lives, particularly with all the growing up drinking from the same cups playing in the same pools shaking the same hands and just generally breathing the same air, though, I suppose it could happen.

I've never known vegetarians to be a particularly hygenic bunch in any traditional sense, but that's probably down to the few vegetarians I know being back to the land types.  Convinced that detergents, disinfectants, deoderants, and even showering itself..are ruining the planet.

And what exactly do you think could cause weaker immune system in vegetarians? Lysine deficiency? Seems rather implausible. It is obvious what could cause stronger, if nothing else, then lower rates of Vitamin C deficiency.

Oh, I wouldn't know bud.  I don't even know that vegetarians have a weaker immune system.  Vitamin c doesn't reduce our chances of getting sick, but you'd be unlikely to find a difference in vitamin c levels between the people where I grew up based on who was or wasn't a vegetarian.   Citrus, strawberries, peppers....these are pretty common things to see on a plate where they're grown. I would guess that the difference in immune system response between individuals, at least the part that we can change by our habits, comes down to who eats well and gets good rest. Not who does or doesn't eat meat.

[Spongebob]

The preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that a well rounded diet, meaning a diverse diet with many different sources of fruits, veggies, grains, meat...so on, is the best way to go and generally supplies the human body with all the nutrients it needs. Vitamin supplements are generally unnecessary but you wouldn't know that by looking at the supplement isle at your local pharmacy. The study done half a century ago that recommended everyone take massive doses of vitamin C has since been shown to be mostly nonsense. V C shows only a minor improvement under the best conditions. Mostly it just turns your pee bright yellow.

[The Grand Nudger]

You just hush up with all that. How would florida offload it's citrus if it couldn't market orange juice as health food, and what would they do with all the waste cake if that couldn't be made into pills? Are you trying to give everyone scurvy?

[Spongebob]

You just hush up with all that.  How would florida offload it's citrus if it couldn't market orange juice as health food, and what would they do with all the waste cake if that couldn't be made into pills?  Are you trying to give everyone scurvy?  

Aye, matie...

This reminds me.  When I was a kid the frozen OJ concentrate was a big deal.  We always had some in the freezer.  Do they still make that stuff?  I haven't seen any in years, not that I miss it.  Maybe it goes into Monster drinks now, I don't know.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's still sold - not just in the frozen foods aisle but commercially, for storefronts interested in bottling and branding their own product.

Tropicana invented the term "not from concentrate", and it's a term of art. The short version is that the only difference in process, as mandated by the fda, between concentrates and juice marketed as fresh, is whether water was extracted prior to transport. The fresh juices™ transport the whole volume, but it's the exact same product that you get in concentrates aside from that. All of this down to the realities of ,producing and processing and storing juice, and the truly amazing thing about citrus, it's flavor - as yet unreplicable.

The reason that the fresh juices seem better to us, than the concentrates used to, is down to the flavor packs improvement over the years, and those are proprietary (as the processes once were broadly, and to this day specifically). If you can find concentrate where you are, and reconstitute it properly, you'd find that they don't taste the way they used to either. In fact, you may be drinking a reconstituted juice marketed as local and fresh, somehow, depending. As with so many other products, it's not uncommon for a "farm fresh juice company" - whatever to have an address that resolves to a bottling plant in mere reality.

When you consider this, the healthy natural ad campaign for sugar water stands out as both more cynical and more brilliant. The two products don't even compete with each other for market share, consumer demographics being sharply split along the lines of the haves, have somes, and have nots.