As for me, I tried being vegetarian, and it didn't work. I started getting ill because of it. Yes, I did take vitamin supplements, but it didn't help much, it seems. I also ate stuff with lots of iron and proteins, among other healthy things. After a few months, I started getting tired easily and I noticed my drawing/art skills were disappearing. Then there was a day when I caught a flu and I was feeling very weak, so I decided to eat some meat for lunch. On the other day, my art skills suddenly improved a lot, and I was surprised. After a week or two, I noticed my skills fading away once again, so I decided to stop being vegetarian, and since then I never again had a problem with my art skills fading away. Well, I don't have any solid medical evidence on how eating meat or not affects my body, but for me, feeling better is evidence enough against being full vegetarian.

I pretty much agree with you, Erkka, I don't know if I can say that killing an animal eating it's meat is good/bad and my reasoning for becoming vegetarian was based on these things:

First, we city dwellers buy meat (and everything) from the supermarket, and it usually comes from a farm far away. This, plus the fact that massive cattle herding helps to increase greenhouse effect, and the fact that big forest areas are destroyed for herding, makes eating meat a bad thing for the environment.

Second, most big farm owners don't care for the well-being of animals during their lifetime, and most of these animals life in very small spaces from the day they are born until the day they die. So, eating meat from big farms is usually bad for the animals.

Last, most of these animals on big farms are fed all kinds of unhealthy stuff, just to make them fat, so they have more meat, and we don't really know how that affects our bodies. So I think is better to be safe than sorry.

Now you're probably thinking, "well, all those things you said only apply to eating meat from big farms". Well, yeah =) That's because I live in a reasonably big city. I'm okay with hunting or herding animals in a small farm where they have a lot of space, where no forest is destroyed and all of that. It's just that where I live I can't do that, cause there's very little space, so I decided to stop eating meat. But it seems I can't live well without meat, so I'll have to keep eating meat from the local supermarket until I live in a place with enough space to herd animals. I don't eat that much meat, so I think it's okay.