“Every holiday is three pounds of fat.” After the house-style life, many people find that “three pounds of fat” is already a very kind figure. The city is unsealed, the spring shirt is getting thinner, and regaining weight control has become a top priority. In order to limit calorie intake, many people will choose vegetarian recipes, such as eating a box of green vegetable salad at noon.
Women usually care more about weight than men, and women are more likely to be vegetarians. Are there more connections between the two?
The vegetarian trend is more likely to impress women
Even aside from losing weight, in recent years, riding on the two major trends of healthy life and low-carbon environmental protection, vegetarianism has become a very cool choice. Although many people are not resistant to cool themes, vegetarian food has an interesting feature: there are far more women who choose vegetarian food than men.
A statistic conducted in the United States found that 76% of all vegans are women, while men only account for 24%. From a global perspective, although the ratio of male and female vegetarians has not reached such an exaggeration of 3: 1, no matter whether it is Europe or Oceania, there are more female or pure vegetarians than males. For example, a 2019 survey in Italy showed that the proportion of female vegetarians is 0.8 percentage points higher than that of males. In a similar survey in the UK, 63% of vegetarians are female, and only 37% are male.
The researchers believe that female vegetarians are more likely to be related to women being more compassionate, and they are more likely to separate the boundaries between animals and food. For example, when women see cute pets, they are more prone to love in their eyes, and the proportion of women in animal rights protection groups is as high as 75%.
American psychologist Carolyn Zemler conducted an experiment in 2018 to see how to solve the dilemma of eating meat and loving animals. Zemler and colleagues organized a total of 460 volunteers and divided them into two groups. The researchers asked these two groups of volunteers to choose a lamb dish.
The information provided by the researchers to one group of volunteers is purely nutritional, but the information provided to the other group of volunteers includes how these lambs are raised and slaughtered, and also provides volunteers with information about these lambs. Video material. The researchers asked the volunteers to fill in their feelings and attitudes towards the meat at the beginning and end to see if there was any change.
The results showed that all women felt bad after learning the information between animals and meat, but men were basically not affected. After the study, women ’s overall interest in meat was reduced.
This makes the researchers more confident that when they are resistant to meat, women are more likely to choose vegetarian food.
Men are not vegetarian
Traditionally speaking, men are carnivores, which is consistent with people’s consistent impression of men.
Steven Heine, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, believes that men ’s preference for meat is related to human past hunting history. Heine said that the process of obtaining meat has always been related to danger, because people used to obtain meat through hunting in the past. Meat is also a precious food, especially in the patriarchal society in the past, it symbolizes a status, so men have priority to eat meat.
In ancient China, there was a saying “meat eaters”, and modern anthropologists have further connected food choices with gender and social structure. British anthropologist Peggy Sandy conducted an interesting study in the 1980s, which compared the power structures of two tribes, mainly hunting and wild vegetable gathering.
The hunting-based culture is mainly meat-based; the food-gathering tribes are mainly vegetarian. Peggy Sandy’s research found that meat-based societies tend to be more patriarchal, while plant-based societies are usually more equal.
Some men worry that if they only eat one plate of vegetarian food for lunch, they will be looked at differently, so they will also be under structural pressure when eating.
Eating more meat means enjoying power, and the usual stereotype is that vegan males lack masculinity. Laura Wright, a professor at the University of West Carolina in the United States and the author of the “Vegetarian Research Project” said: “Meat consumption is closely related to masculinity and is difficult to separate.” Affected by this, some men worry that if they only eat one for lunch Plate vegetarian dishes, people will cast a strange look, so they also underwent structural pressure when eating.
In fact, men also pay a healthy price for the priority of this food choice. A diet that consumes a lot of animal fat has been shown to be closely related to coronary heart disease, while a diet low in saturated fat and plant-based foods greatly reduces the risk of heart disease. At present, the biggest killer of men over the age of 50 is heart disease, and diet is the most important risk factor. The World Health Organization has determined that processed red meat food is one of the clear causes of cancer, causing approximately 34,000 deaths worldwide each year. Therefore, women generally live longer than men, and can also find reasons for their eating habits.
By-products of business culture
In the pervasive business culture, whether to eat meat or to be a vegetarian has been clearly distinguished according to gender. For example, most of the advertisements accompanied by steaks or fried chickens are men, and those with fruits, vegetables and vegetables are women.
In the modern food system, obtaining meat is much simpler than a nutritionally balanced vegetarian diet. Following a vegetarian diet will take more time and a strong will to persevere. It is not surprising that vegetarianism has become a female-led lifestyle, because women tend to pay more attention to their own health and have more mobility.
Vegetarians generally believe that avoiding the use of animal products is ethical, and believe that doing so is healthier and more environmentally friendly. People with this vision are also mainly women.
Because women are the main force of vegetarianism, some stores have started precision marketing. For example, there is a vegetarian restaurant bar called “Pretty She” in northern Melbourne, Australia. According to the store rules, in addition to the seat “ladies first”, men consume 18% more than women in the store.
The female owner of the restaurant bar, Alex O’Brien, called the vegetarian restaurant bar “operated by women and serving women.” Unfortunately, this vegetarian restaurant and bar was closed in the summer of 2019 after operating for more than two years. Although restaurant operators have targeted market segments, they have overlooked a possible problem: Although vegetarians are predominantly female, there are not many men responsible for paying the bills.