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Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
I tried being a vegetarian. It hurt. Literally. I'm already mildly lactose intolerant so it was really difficult for me to ingest enough cholesterol to have sex. I lost the willpower to chase women, ended up losing something like 20 lbs off a 180 lb frame, masturbation became a chore and I looked generally fucking terrible. I pooped like 4x daily and it wreaked havoc on my GI tract (probably from eating too much fiber and too little water...hey, I like to drink). After a while I realized having an environmental conscience is not nearly as important as a health conscience.
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I can understand how distressing it would be to experience a sudden reduction in libido, since sexuality can be such a revitalizing part of life. However, I think you are being overly hasty in concluding that a nearly vegan diet was responsible for your troubles. My reasons:
(1) Well-planned vegan diets, which lack any dietary cholesterol, are known to be healthful: Vegetarian Diets
It is possible, of course, that your particular physiology prevented you from thriving even on a well-planned vegan diet...although I'm not sure what the reason for that might be.
(2) Humans are generally able to biosynthesize all the cholesterol their bodies need, and dietary sources of cholesterol have much less impact on blood cholesterol levels than people once thought:
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Fats and Cholesterol: Out with the Bad, In with the Good - What Should I Eat? - The Nutrition Source - Harvard School of Public Health
Most people make more cholesterol than they absorb from their food. A body of scientific studies shows only a weak relationship between the amount of cholesterol a person consumes and his or her blood cholesterol levels (weak but important for heart disease). For most people, the amount of cholesterol eaten has only a modest impact on the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood.
The types of fat in the diet determine to a large extent the amount of total and LDL cholesterol in the bloodstream. Cholesterol in food matters, too, but not nearly as much.
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(3) It isn't clear that increasing a person's cholesterol levels through diet will cause his or her testosterone levels to increase, with free testosterone being the form that appears to be active.
For example, here is a study on testosterone levels in vegans and omnivores that found that vegan men actually had higher testosterone levels and nearly the same levels of free testosterone as omnivores:
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Key, T. et al. (2007) Testosterone, sex hormone-binding globulin, calculated free testosterone, and oestradiol in male vegans and omnivores, British Journal of Nutrition, 64: pp 111-119. http://journals.cambridge.org/downlo...fbe7a12d05dd39
It is concluded that a vegan diet ... has little effect on total or free T [Testosterone] or on E2 [oestradiol].
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(4) The relationship between testosterone levels and libido isn't simple or clear, since sex drive depends on many factors, not just testosterone levels. Testosterone levels don't perfectly predict libido:
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From: Low Testosterone Effects on Sex Drive: Low Libido and More.
Low testosterone symptoms don't always include feeling like you have no sex drive. Some men maintain sexual desire at relatively low testosterone levels. For other men, libido may lag even with normal testosterone levels.
Surprisingly, low testosterone by itself rarely causes erectile dysfunction, or ED. Low testosterone alone -- with no other health problems -- accounts for a small minority of men with erectile dysfunction. Erection problems are usually caused by atherosclerosis -- hardening of the arteries.
Low testosterone is only one of the causes of low libido. Stress, sleep deprivation, depression, and chronic medical illnesses can also sap a man's sex drive.
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A study in which young men were given testosterone injections to nearly double their testosterone levels found that the heightened testosterone levels had little effect on the men's sexual behavior:
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From: O’Connor, D. B., Archer, J., and F. C. W. Wu (2004) Effects of Testosterone on Mood, Aggression, and Sexual Behavior in Young Men: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Study, The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 89 (6): 2837
Effects of Testosterone on Mood, Aggression, and Sexual Behavior in Young Men: A Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Cross-Over Study
The present results also confirmed that raising T [testosterone] levels into the supraphysiological range in healthy young men did not increase the interactional (i.e. the frequency of sexual intercourse) or noninteractional aspects of sexual behavior (i.e. sexual desire or intercourse satisfaction).
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Lucifer, considering your own bad experiences when eating a vegetarian diet that appears to have lacked dairy but should have included eggs (a source of cholesterol that could be used instead of dairy or meat if you really wanted to increase your cholesterol intake), one possible explanation is that your dairy-free vegetarian diet simply was not a balanced one.
For example, perhaps you weren't eating sufficient levels of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats such as from nuts. Your rapid weight loss is a red flag that your diet may not have been adequate.
You might also be someone with hypocholesterolemia whose body has very low cholesterol levels (such as less than 50 mg/dL) due to a disease or an inherited problem in your cholesterol biosynthesis pathway:
Hypocholesterolemia. [Curr Vasc Pharmacol. 2011] - PubMed - NCBI
If I were your doctor (and if I *were* a doctor 
), I would have:
(1) referred you to a nutritionist to ensure your diet was providing you with all the nutrients you needed;
(2) drawn your blood to obtain your fasting blood levels of cholesterol (total, HDL, and LDL);
(3) measured your total testosterone and free testosterone levels.
I agree that your health is most important, yet your description of what happened does not convince me that a nearly vegan diet was the cause of the problem, especially since I've not heard of vegan men in general having disappointing sex lives or sex drives.
I'm curious now what your doctor found out about you during your experience with vegetarianism. Do you have records of your cholesterol levels before and during your vegetarian phase, for example? As a vegan, the lowest my Total Cholesterol has been is 110 mg/dL and the highest is 127 mg/dL. I've been biosynthisizing all my own cholesterol for 14 years now...and I also produced all the cholesterol in a 9 lb 10 oz baby!
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Originally Posted by lucifer_sam
I don't mean to break your balls Tore but you are seriously taking your ethical obligation way too far here. No meat-eater needs to apologize for the harm they're doing to the animal kingdom. Meat is a necessary component for survival. (And please, Erica, don't spout first-world sympathy to me, I've heard it all before. Yours is an irrational form of moral outrage.)
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What makes you think that meat is a necessary component for survival? If it were, how could I be typing this?
How could 30% of the population of India be vegetarian?
Can you think of any situation in which meat-eaters *should* apologize for the harm they're doing to the animal kingdom? Will you eat any animal without any twinge of conscience? A dolphin? A dog?
Finally, about my sympathy for animals and my moral outrage: what determines whether an emotional response is "irrational" or not? Aren't emotions distinct from reasoning and thus can't be determined to be "rational" or "irrational?"
I would say that a person's emotional response might be "unusual" yet not "irrational." Most people don't feel sad like I do when I see someone eating a chicken or part of a pig. I acknowledge that. Yet rather than viewing my response as irrational, I view *their* response as callous and oddly emotionally empty...and all too normal. From my vantage point as a vegan, it is as if part of their emotional center is dead and they seem emotionally blind when it comes to animals.
I recall how I felt when I was emotionally "blind" to food animals. Thinking about their feelings and experiences just wasn't something I did very often. It was as if their experiences didn't exist. In my view, ignoring other beings' existence, and one's impact on these animals, doesn't seem very rational.