Vegetarians? Who are they? Aren’t they those unhealthy, pale-faced tree-huggers? Don’t they eat cardboard-type foods that have no flavour, and protest about people eating proper food?
The answer to these questions is NO! Vegetarians can be healthier than most people, and they don’t just live up trees and make a nuisance of themselves! Anyone can become a vegetarian, and you don’t need to eat just vegetables!
People become vegetarian for several reasons such as a need to improve their health, not wanting to eat meat, and wanting to reduce their cholesterol level.
There are a lot of vegetarian products for sale at the moment. You can buy multiple foods of every type, go to a veggie restaurant, or even book into a vegetarian hotel or health club!
Vegetarianism benefits everyone. 30% of the landmass of the USA is used as grazing land for cattle bred purely for slaughter. Currently 1000 species are becoming extinct every year due to the destruction of tropical rainforests being cleared to breed animals to be killed for meat. These precious trees are being cut down in rain forests, ensuring that there is less oxygen for us to breathe, as there are fewer photosynthesising trees.
Vegetarians can practically assure them selves of healthier, and therefore happier lives! By being vegetarian you can reduce the risk of having a heart attack by up to 90%, and reduce the risk of many types of cancer.
If you are vegetarian you have a 40% less chance of premature mortality. Vegetarian diets have also been proven to help prevent diabetes, arthritis and gall stones. Also, if you become vegetarian you are practically guaranteed to have your cholesterol levels reduced in just a few months!
As Albert Einstein said, ‘Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances of survival on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.’
It is also very fashionable to be veggie! Famous vegetarians include; Drew Barrymore, Sir Isaac Newton, Steven Spielberg, Brad Pitt, Paul and Linda McCartney, Bryan Adams, Vincent Van Gogh, Demi Moore, and Oscar Wilde!
There is no shortage of support for vegetarianism in Literature. William Shakespeare wrote, ‘He is a heavy eater of beef. Me thinks it doth harm his wit,’ in his famous play, Twelfth Night. This shows he obviously knew that an excess of meat could be dangerous.
Some people think that vegetarians do not get adequate protein and vitamins. This is mainly untrue as vegetarians often get as much, or more of these vital elements as in a ‘normal’ diet. Protein can be received from nuts, and from products made using Soya, both of which don’t have the fat content that meat does.
There is also the most important and most acknowledged argument for anyone showing the benefits of vegetarianism: cruelty and slaughtering of animals. Six billion cows are killed every year to make food, and a large amount of this meat is made into hamburgers. In America, on average, children between the ages of 7 and 13 eat 6.2 hamburgers every week, and over 6.7 million hamburgers are sold per year!
Is it right for these animals to be so cruelly and horribly killed, just to end up on our dinner plate, when it has been proven that humans can survive perfectly well, and very healthily without these mass killings? Oscar Wilde once said, ‘If abattoirs were made of glass, I believe that the amount of meat eaters would decrease dramatically.’ This is a very valid point, as some of abattoirs do not use the most humane methods possible, and I doubt that if a lot of people were asked to kill a cow to make their own hamburger, they would agree to do so.
It’s easy to eat meat and not think about the suffering that the animal had to go through, isn’t it? Consider next time you go out for a quick McDonalds, ‘Is the satisfaction I am getting from eating this hamburger worth the amount of suffering the poor cow had to go through?’ I’ll leave you to your own decision, but if you ask me the answer is an emphatic and definite NO! Is a life worth a quick meal?
