You are what you eat
What nutrition and personality have to do with each other
Diet: It gives us a greater insight into personality than many people realize.
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Nutrition says more about our personality than many people realize.
Omnivore, vegetarian, vegan, flexitarian: There are many names for different diets. A meta-analysis has now found that these people differ not only because of their attitude towards meat consumption – there are also certain characteristics on a personal level that are more likely to appear in meat eaters or vegetarians.
Analysis compares meat consumers to vegetarians
There are enough prejudices for meat fans and vegetarians: some should be inconsiderate towards the environment and their own bodies, others should be know-it-alls and don’t begrudge anyone. Of course, as with so many clichés and prejudices, these attributes are hardly fair to the groups. But some scientists now wanted to know for sure and took it all 25 studies in which a total of over 23,000 subjects were examined.
They wanted to find out which personality traits the members of the two groups have: Are meat consumers really as ruthless as they are said to be? And are vegetarians hopeless do-gooders?
What nutrition says about personality
In fact, the researchers came to some exciting conclusions about personality. Each person has to decide for themselves how much can really be transferred to the individual.
According to the study results, vegetarians should have these characteristics:
- Altruism: According to the results of the study, selflessness and unselfish thinking should be a characteristic of vegetarians.
- Great interest in politics, little tendency towards conservativeness
- Greater interest in (food) health and education in this area
- Pride, especially in relation to one’s way of life
- More neurotic and emotionally unstable than meat eaters, coupled with lower self-esteem
Characteristics that, according to the study results, meat consumers tend to have
- Lower moral self-esteem (regarding the consumption and use of animal products)
- Meat consumers, in contrast to vegetarians, see charity more often as a “target value”.
- Meat eaters are associated with a greater emphasis on social power
- Greater tendency to prejudice
- According to the study, omnivores are less open to new experiences
What does that tell us? So are vegetarians not only politically interested do-gooders, but also bad-tempered, physically healthy and neurotic? And are meat eaters only interested in power, traditional values and charity? no At the end of the day, people are all individuals and very different. There is no “one vegetarian man” any more than there is “one meat-eating man”.
But what the meta-analysis shows is that diet may also be related to one’s personality, and the food on a person’s plate tells us more about them than we might have previously thought. In other words: bon appetit!
Source used: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov