There is an abundance of scientific evidence which conclusively proves that a vegetarian diet is not just adequate but rather it is absolutely superior in just about every way. Whether it be health, economy, ecology, or the rights of animals, vegetarianism is the right choice.
Reasons To Choose Vegetarianism
One great reason to make a healthy choice for vegetarianism is due to scientific evidence that strongly suggests that humans are not really suited to eat meat. We actually possess features that lend themselves to a strictly herbivorous diet. Our teeth are not sharp enough to tear through the hide or bone of the animals we ingest. That is the reason we alter them through long cooking, tenderizing, etc. Humans are equipped with a long digestive tract as are all herbivores. The anatomical construction of carnivores on the other hand, allows them to quickly rid their digestive tract of the meat before it putrefies. If you are a meat eater, then as disgusting as it might sound, you have undigested putrefied animal flesh in your intestines and it has been there for a long time.
Animal Flesh Is An Inferior Health Choice
Meat is almost completely void of carbohydrates, has no fiber or vitamin C, and is a very poor source of calcium. It is however an excellent source of saturated fat and cholesterol. That is why so many Americans have advanced hardening of the arteries and heart disease. Heart disease takes more American lives than all other diseases and it occurs at a rate 3 times higher in meat eaters than in vegetarians. Meat eaters double their chances of colon cancer and rectal cancer, while tripling their chances of ****** cancer. Moreover, the excessively high protein content in meat puts undue stress on the liver and kidneys. Osteoporosis and gout are just a few more of the bad side effects linked to meat consumption.
It should also be noted that there are a host of unnatural substances in meat and poultry which wreak havoc on our systems. The list is really rather extensive, but just to name a few there are hormones, antibiotics, tranquilizers, preservatives and various pesticides. These and more substances that precipitate your health problems all become part of every piece of meat you ingest during the breeding of the animal and during the processing of its flesh for human consumption.
Meat Consumption Is An Acquired Habit
You do not need meat to survive. In reality, according to medical science and statistics, your love affair with meat is probably going to kill you. The only reason you and I were raised on the flesh of intelligent animals and their by-products is due to misinformation that the meat, egg, and dairy industries have for years forced down our throats through advertising campaigns, and a barrage of media. They have long since bought off the USDA, consequently they have enjoyed a long tenure of our own government actually backing and proliferating this prescription for slow death and heart disease.
Without indoctrination, if given the choice between a colorful piece of fruit, or the bland rotting carcass of an intelligent animal, humans would generally choose the fruit. There is no preparation necessary, except to pick it off the tree. The meat on the other hand would be too disgusting to eat straight from the kill as carnivores do, so we must alter it in such a way that it makes it more palatable. You do not naturally possess a taste for this. You must acquire it. Vegetarian cuisine is full flavored, and naturally colorful and agreeable to look at. You will never get bored eating a full vegetarian diet, nor will you live long enough to even scratch the surface of the many different varieties of meals you can prepare. Vegetarian cuisine gives you a whole world of wonderful flavors, aromas, and textures. Moreover, every time you consume whole natural foods you take a long step towards the healing of your body. This cannot be said for meat consumption.
By: Mark Brohl
About the Author:
Dedicated to the advancement of informed choices that will benefit our health, our environment, and our animal friends.
Please visit my website at http://www.ourhealthforlife.com and look around awhile. I would very much appreciate comments concerning your reaction to what I have written as well as any input that might aid me in the task of making my site more helpful. I thank you in advance for your consideration.
Filed under News And Society by on Nov 19th, 2010. 
In Part One, I focused my discussion mainly on the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. But personal health is not the only reason that a vegetarian diet is superior. Whether it be health, economy, ecology, or the rights of animals, vegetarianism is the right choice.
Vegetarianism Is A Good Economic Choice
During hard economic times people are forced to adopt a more healthy vegetarian diet. This is due to the rising cost of living as well as the rising cost of animal flesh and their by-products. Pound for pound, plant based foods are a more economical choice than meat. They are naturally high in fiber as well as vitamins and minerals. Even though protein derived from plants is more beneficial than protein from animal flesh, nevertheless the same amount of protein obtained from plants will cost eighty percent less than that which is obtained from meat.
Another unfortunate by-product of animal farming is that many small farmers have been forced out of business due to gigantic agricultural companies. This is not a good thing when economies are already facing high unemployment rates.
Vegetarianism Is Natural Resource Friendly
Producing and processing animal flesh and their by-products puts a huge strain on the land, water supplies, energy, and raw materials. These resources are finite and are being rapidly depleted. This should cause every thinking person great concern. A responsible vegetarian lifestyle makes the most of natural resources unlike the wastefulness of animal farming.
Vegetarianism Is Food Resource Friendly
If everyone in the world were to adopt a vegetarian diet, human hunger would be eradicated. If all agricultural lands were used for feeding people instead of livestock, we could easily nourish over twice the population of this planet. For every one hundred people that can be fed when the land is used to feed livestock, fourteen hundred people could be fed if the same land was used for raising crops for human consumption. Livestock must consume over twenty five pounds of grain to yield a mere pound of flesh. As an aside I hope that the reader will note that they should be eating grass since they cannot adequately digest grain. They are fed grain because it fattens them up for slaughter much quicker. This is just one of the many abuses these poor animals are subjected to.
Of course these facts will mean nothing if one does not feel any inclination towards doing their part to end world hunger. Unfortunately, it is quite evident to this writer that most Americans would rather send twenty dollars per month to a hunger relief program than to consider ending their unhealthy love affair with meat. The former might sponsor one child but the latter would sponsor a whole village. It might assuage our consciences to give a little cash to a worthy program but the only way to make a real and lasting difference is to give up the consumption of meat.
Vegetarianism Demonstrates Respect For Our Animal Friends
Every time we consume animal products we are directly responsible for the torture and slaughter of innocent sentient creatures. Every meat eater should at the very least acknowledge this as fact and own his or her part in this brutality.
These are just a few good reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle. If you have a desire to experience optimum health while doing your part to aid in the healing of our environment as well as put a stop to farm factory animal abuse, please take the time to examine the benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle. You have absolutely nothing to lose but your cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and a few unwanted pounds.
By: Mark Brohl
About the Author:
Dedicated to the advancement of informed choices that will benefit our health, our environment, and our animal friends.
Please visit my website at http://www.ourhealthforlife.com and look around awhile. I would very much appreciate comments concerning your reaction to what I have written as well as any input that might aid me in the task of making my site more helpful. I thank you in advance for your consideration.
Filed under News And Society by on Nov 17th, 2010.
It seems that every second Hollywood star is a vegetarian, giving up meat for health or moral reasons. Vegetarian societies can now provide long lists of entertainers who don’t eat meat, including vegetarians like Clint Eastwood, Dustin Hoffman, Kate Winslet and Natalie Portman, and pescatarians like Hillary Swank (who eat fish, but no other animals).
With the list of notable vegetarians reading like an invitation list for Oscars night, it is not unusual for someone to ask “How did it all start?” Perhaps surprisingly, it is not a recent trend, but something that goes back some 90 years, to when the movie business was still new.
In the early days of the movies, Mary Pickford was the biggest star in Hollywood – even more popular than her friend and business partner, Charlie Chaplin. Specialising in playing cute children like Little Lord Fauntleroy and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (she was only five feet tall and had a young face), she was known as “America’s Sweetheart” – and later, due to her global fame, “The World’s Sweetheart”.
Mary gave up meat and fish after reading “The Jungle”, Upton Sinclair’s disturbing expose of the meat industry in New York, with vivid descriptions of the assembly-line slaughterhouses. “It was too much for some of the visitors,” wrote Sinclair (who himself became a vegetarian), “and the women would stand with hands clenched and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes.”
Pickford, however, was not the only vegetarian Hollywood star of the early days. English actor George Arliss, already a popular star of the American theatre, entered movies in the 1921. At a time when vegetarianism in the West seemed peculiar and eccentric, he was a pioneer. “Doesn’t it seem probable that many of our diseases are the result of meat eating?” he once asked. “It’s an unpleasant habit… eating kidneys and liver and picking the bones… We shudder at the very thought of cannibals, but is there really any difference?”
Another great silent film star, Gloria Swanson, would also follow her rival Mary Pickford into a vegetarian diet. Other early stars dabbled in it. Marion Davies, one of the top comediennes of the 1920s, temporarily became a vegetarian after playing hostess to visiting Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, an outspoken member of the London Vegetarian Society.
However, though they might have been the first, these stars were not as outspoken about their vegetarianism as current stars. Unlike Woody Harrelson or Toni Collette, they did not campaign for animal rights, or publicly extol the virtues of a vegetarian diet to stay young and slim. Stars of 80 or 90 years ago were not encouraged to speak their minds in such a way.
However, as Pickford was Hollywood’s most popular hostess, her meat-free diet would have been known to the fanzines and industry figures of the day (though it might have been considered eccentric). Today’s stars, able to choose from a number of chic vegetarian caf
Filed under News And Society by on Nov 15th, 2010.
As it turns out, some of your favorite celebrities may also be vegetarians. Pamela Anderson, Paul McCartney, Alicia Silverstone, Moby and Andre 3000 of Outkast are among the many vegetarian celebrities who decided to stop eating meat because of the harm that factory farming does to animals, our health and the planet.
Former Beatle Paul McCartney said he was first turned on to animal rights as a child. Disney movies like Bambi and Dumbo instilled in him a belief that animal cruelty is a bad idea. He once said, “If you think of Bambi, its mum gets killed by a hunter and I think that made me grow up thinking hunting isn’t cool”.
McCartney decided to finally make the move to vegetarianism when he and his wife Linda were eating a meal of lamb and happened to see lambs frolicking in a field. This experience helped him make the connection between the food on his plate and living, sentient animals.
Supermodel and former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson has been a vegetarian since the age of 16. In high school, she used to donate rolls of quarters to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the popular nonprofit animal rights organization. Since then this vegetarian celebrity has become an outspoken activist for PETA, participating in many of their campaigns including ones against fur, seal hunting and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Alicia Silverstone, the young actress who made her debut in the movie Clueless, went vegan in 1998 for moral and political reasons. She once said to talk show host Rosie O’Donnell that she went vegan because she “was not going to contribute to the violence in the world anymore”. She said that going vegan meant putting food back into the mouths of starving children, since crops grown to feed cows could otherwise be used to feed villages.
Silverstone also has her own vegetable garden, where she grows vegetables like lettuce, kale and pumpkins. “To make your salad from your own garden is just amazing”, she once said to talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.
Singer Moby first exposed his veganism in an angsty punk rock album titled Animal Rights, arguably the most controversial album of his career. Since then, he has taken a more utilitarian approach in order to make his message more accessible to the masses.
Moby encourages vegetarians and vegans to become salesmen for what they believe. He himself does this by aggressively championing vegetarianism in the public eye. Moby also promotes vegetarianism in his vegetarian tea shop, Teany.
Outkast star Andre 3000 is also a vegetarian celebrity. In 2004, he won PETA’s award for Sexiest Male Vegetarian. When Andre was asked what he would do on his last day on Earth, he said, “I’d probably go for a great meal-some broccoli probably, because I’m a vegetarian”.
Other notable vegetarian celebrities include Coldplay’s Steve Martin, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Avril Lavigne, Fall Out Boy’s Andy Hurley, Natalie Portman, Good Charlotte’s Benji and Joel Madden, Alec Baldwin, Anne Hathaway, Joaquin Phoenix, Tobey Maguire, Shania Twain and Weird Al Yankovic.
By: Michael Russell
About the Author:
Read more on Vegetarian Celebrities Opt for Cruelty-Free Living…
Filed under News And Society by on Jul 2nd, 2010.
Values Driven Vegetarian – What does that mean? Some values have to do with telling the truth. Other values determine our work ethic. Most people think of values as related to character. What does that have to do with food? Warning! You might find this article provocative – but not because I’m trying to tell you what to eat.
Instead I’m going to ask you what the term vegetarian means to you personally. For you carnivores reading this article, it may be difficult to understand why anyone would give up hamburgers or pepperoni pizza. You may believe that God put animals here on the planet to be eaten. Or God may not come into your consideration of food choices. I’ve had people tell me they can’t imagine giving up eating meat for any reason. Perhaps you’ll have a different understanding of dietary choices after you finish reading.
We Americans do tend to want what we want. Often we want what we want now. Our decisions don’t always make sense to other people. I’ll tell you a true story. Much of my life I’ve owned and ridden horses. The pleasure of time with my horses always has overridden the cost. I’ve never understood the question when non-horse people asked why I had such an expensive hobby. Why would I not spend time and money on something I found so enjoyable? I figured they just didn’t understand horse people.
On the other hand, one thing I’ve never been able to understand is how some people can drive vehicles, e.g., hummer-type, with its large size and low gas mileage. With our planetary resources being as they are, why would any one choose such an inefficient means of transportation. Who needs a hummer in the US?
Then driving down the road one day as a hummer passed me, I got it. Just as I have always wanted horses, that person wanted a hummer. That was it. Our values were different. I would feel uncomfortable driving a gas guzzler. Perhaps the hummer driver would see my horses as a wasteful use of money. We each made our choices according to what we wanted. Pretty simple. If I want it and can pay for it, I can have it. It’s my right as an American.
My horses had value to me and and were an expression of my values. The hummer had value that were expressed by the driver of that particular vehicle. Each of us believed we could have what we want – and had the right to have what we wanted. My value was horses bring me joy. I can only speculate on why the driver wanted the hummer, but I do know that it was a value connected to a belief that determined his choice. Big equals power? Different is fun?
Similar want/value variations of thinking are common among both vegetarians and carnivores/omnivores. We may not understand the position of the other because we believe differently. Our values are not same in this area. However, our beliefs, values and behaviors are all connected whether we’re omnivore, vegetarian, or vegan.
Some will say if, ” I want a hamburger or a steak or bacon or chicken wings, I can have any or all of them. The choice to eat meat and animal products is my right. I can eat what I want as much as I want whenever I want.” Those same people might say that it made little difference to them that dolphins were caught in the tuna nets. Too bad. So what? Their values expressed as behaviors don’t include respect for animal life. Values regarding food as providing nutrients to support body processes may not be the the stronger value either. No body, vegetarian or not, ever needs french fries and soda. Yet, most young people drink soda…and as they mature, their taste may change to martinis – which offer little if any nutritional value.
As a culture, we do value our rights. And our rights are a direct expression of our values. Have you ever thought of rights and choices in that way?
What I’m saying is while I may agree with our right to eat what we want, have as many kids as we want, drive the vehicles we want, smoke the cigarettes we want, and have all the horses we want, there are consequences to those choices. What we want and demand the right to have may not be wise in the long term.
Our values determine what is important to us. Our values determine our decisions re the choices we make. Is our value placed on immediate gratification or determined by future consequences of what we say and do? Do we value our right to eat a hamburger today more than the preservation of the environment for our children and grandchildren? How many burger eaters consider the crops, water and other resources required to raise that steer? More than eight billion animals are slaughtered each year. Could there possibly be a less efficient use of our natural resources?
We chop down oxygen providing rain forests to create more beef for the government subsidized meat industry. We factory farm the animals and send pollution uninhibited onto the land and into the air and water.
Vegetarians and environmentalists have been much maligned during most of my life time because they’ve seen the big picture. They tried to educate the American public of consequences to a meat based diet. The issue is much larger than the bacon and eggs you had for breakfast or the hamburger you had for lunch. The larger view is of the consequences of raising and eating animals, of use of land and water, of starvation and pollution.
Do you know that the methane gas from the cattle we raise for slaughter cause more harm to the environment than vehicle emissions from all the cars on the planet? There is far more untreated animal waste than treated human waste. Run off from factory hog farms ends up in the river. Perhaps the same river you enjoy boating on…or swimming in. We have dead zones in the ocean where no sea life can exist. They are increasing in size every day as a result of pollution.
Do you value your right to eat that hamburger more than the right of future generations to live on a markedly less polluted planet? Do you believe that the choices you make are significant? Do you think what you eat has no impact on either your body or the planet? Do you value living for today because you may not be here tomorrow?
Of course you have the right to eat meat.
But what do you do when you can’t stand to think that your hamburger was once an animal? You have to block those thoughts or they’d bother you. You might not even be able to eat a hamburger ever again. What would people say?!?! When you make your choices because of what other people say, that’s also a value. You believe what they have to say is more important than your own experience of truth.
On the other hand, you might want to ask yourself what would it feel like to honor your feelings about eating that hamburger. Allow yourself to think of the animal that died to provide this meal for you. Try it. You may still decide to eat the burger, but you may appreciate it in a different way. You might have no sadness or angst, but instead gratitude for the availability of this food you enjoy thoroughly as nourishment for your body. Or, you may choose not to eat the burger. Either way, you would be living your life and making your decisions in a manner congruent with your beliefs and values.
When we live our lives in accordance with our conscious values, we experience significantly less internal conflict. When we are aware of our values in each area of our lives, we make choices that support our beliefs and so our actions are congruent with our words. Life becomes less stressful.
This article is on the topic of values and vegetarianism. Beliefs and values, behaviors and consequences, priorities and conflicts are all a normal part of life in every aspect of our lives. We make choices, hundreds of choices, every day. Many are unconscious. We may not even realize we’re choosing.
We all make choices about food. With every bite we put in our mouths we make a statement. What we eat or don’t eat tells others who we are and something about what we believe and value. Choices are different for omnivores, flexitarians, vegetarians and vegans. Which values determine your choices? Do you know? Are you curious? Can you see the consequences of your choices? Do you believe what you choose to eat makes a difference – to your health and to the health of the planet?
Ask yourself. See what answers you get. Then consider whether your actions are consistent with what you say you believe.
By: Gayle Evans
About the Author:
Read more on Vegetarian Lifestyle – Values Driven Vegetarian…
Filed under News And Society by on Jun 19th, 2010.