How Can You Benefit From Being On A Vegetarian Diet

Posted on February 3, 2010 @ 11:48 pm

Not long ago, a well-known star made the headlines when he made an environmental plea for everyone to adopt a low carb vegetarian diet. He was not even advocating a total abstinence from meat - just one day a week. Many of the newspapers that covered the story were unkind. They laughed and called him an old hippy who didn’t know what he was talking about.

What the media almost universally overlooked was the truth behind his words. If everyone understood the facts about vegetarianism, they would understand why so many people have given up meat eating and felt better for it. Let’s take a cold, hard look at meat eating from a vegetarian’s point of view.

You might wonder what giving up meat has to do with the environment. There are whole books devoted to facts about the meat processing industry. One of the points made is that raising beef is a terribly inefficient use of arable land. The same amount of land that it takes to satisfy America’s voracious appetite for meat could be put to far better use producing soy products, for instance.

There are direct health risks involved with the processing of beef. Workers in these industries suffer from a variety of illnesses directly related to their industry and the risks spread to the nearby communities, as well. You can look up the medical data on this or you can quickly find out for yourself by visiting one of these places. If you have never smelled a meat processing plant before, be forewarned. You’re likely to get sick to your stomach before you even pass through the gates.

Unless you are a hardened killer, you will be shocked by what you see inside the meat processing plant. To call it inhumane is putting it mildly. While the killing process itself is not necessarily an environmental issue, it is a moral one. It is doubtful that you will reach for a shrink-wrapped sirloin steak quite so quickly after you have seen what happened at the slaughterhouse. You are more likely to turn away and go to the vegetable department and start your vegetarian diet!

The meat industry will tell you that beef makes you strong and healthy. They will talk about a protein-packed meat diet as if a high intake of meat is essential for health. What they won’t tell you is that you are consuming far more meat than you could possibly need for good health. They will also not tell you that your predominantly meat diet contributes to cancer, heart disease and other life-threatening illnesses.

Ask anyone who has given a vegetarian weight loss diet a chance and most of them will tell you that they are happier for it. Many never eat meat again. Almost no one who has been a vegetarian ever goes back to eating large amounts of meat. No matter what the meat industry tries to tell us to the contrary, a vegetarian diet is a healthy diet.

Interestingly, even the Catholic Church recommends that and most major religions advocate abstinence from meat from time to time, if not permanently. Hindus and many Buddhists have been vegetarians for millennia and it has worked for them. In fact, it seems like the only ones who advocate a high meat diet are the cattle industry lobbyists!

The vegetarian diet meal plans is no laughing matter. Do you think that the superstar who recently advocated abstinence from meat didn’t know he was going to be laughed at? Give him a little credit for trying to open people’s eyes. Check out the facts, for your sake as well as everyone else’s!



   Posted in Food    

Subscribe RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or Trackback from your own site.





Leave a Reply