Being vegetarian

When people find out that I'm vegetarian, they always ask why. They seem to think that I can give a simple ten second answer, and I'm pretty sure they expect to not agree. But more and more often, I'm finding that people are more receptive to the idea. They may not think that they can do it, but they still seem to agree that it would be healthier. So, I want to take a little time and explain some of my reasons on my blog.

First of all, I don't limit myself to any one reason, or just a few of them. There are a lot of reasons, and all of them work for me. I figure, with so many reasons, it's obvious that being vegetarian is the right way to go. The toughest part in starting this list is deciding where to start and what to include. Since most people seem to respond to the idea of the personal health reasons, let's start there. When it started for me, back in 1993, I was in college (I started late) and most of my information came from word of mouth. The first, and by far best source of information I came across that included facts based on research, was "Diet for a New America", by John Robbins, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He's the son of Robbins, from Baskin Robbins Ice Cream. Who better to talk about such a topic, right? Well, it turns out he knows quite a bit. His book is a wealth of knowledge. For example, one of the first questions people ask is, "where to you get your protein." The answer is, from pretty much everything. Anything that has ever lived, needs protein to survive and grow, even plants. To support this answer, I would like to impose on your sense of logic. Look at the largest land animals on this planet, elephants, hippos, cows, and many more. They are all pretty much herbivores (vegetarians), and nobody wonders where their protein comes from. And, in the typical American diet, about twice the recommended, or required amount of protein is consumed. So, no real problem there, you just need to eat a good variety of foods to make sure you get all of your nutrients.

Something else I learned from the book, although is was only a theory at the time and has since been proven, is that even though American's consume more dairy than any other culture we still have the highest incidents of osteoporosis. Does that make sense, after all the marketing from the dairy industry to tell you how good milk is for us, especially against osteoporosis? The reason, is because our bodies utilize calcium in processing animals proteins, so most of it never makes it to our bones.

I'll move on to another aspect of being vegetarian now. The environmental impact of eating meat. To raise livestock for meat, we utilize literally tons of resources, like water, corn and soy. If we took the soy and corn that we use to feed livestock and gave it to humans, we wouldn't have people starving in the world. Eighty to ninety percent of both crops go towards feeding livestock. And we get such a small return on that investment, about ten to one. Meaning it takes ten pounds of these crops to get a pound of meat. And the type of farms that these animals are raised on are destroying the environment around them. Thousands of animals crammed together eating a food they weren't designed for (corn). That's right, cows bodies become acidic and sick from all of the corn they are fed, because they are meant to eat grass. But they don't grow fast enough from grass, and they aren't fat enough then either. (Another reason eating meat is not healthy) And all of these animals create a lot of manure, which ends up contaminating a lot of ground water systems and could be causing birth defects in the local communities.

In countries in South America, rain forest are being destroyed to create more farm land for raising beef and livestock. This land isn't very fertile, because the fertility of a rain forest is mostly in the plants and animals, not the ground it's on. So once it's wiped out, it's gone for good.

Moving right along, I hope I haven't bored you yet. Let's get to what is probably the least important factor for most, the treatment of the animals. Animal husbandry used to be more about caring for the animals, and letting them feed on the local grass until they naturally reached maturity and were ready for slaughter. If this were the way things were still done, I could be more accepting. It wouldn't bother me so much if someone chose to still eat meat. But this is far from how things are done now a days. In most cases the animals are not allowed to roam, in fact, most are prevented from moving much at all. They are given diets that are not natural to them, and cause their bodies to become toxic. To counter this we give them tons of antibiotics just to keep them alive until they are ready to slaughter. By that time, most of them are close to death anyway.

I could go on for quite a while, but the fact is, anybody who has read this far is probably already interested, and I'm preaching to the choir. All others probably didn't get past the title. If you are interested, and want a quite easy way to get your feet wet on this information, Diet for a New American also comes in a video format that you can watch on YouTube.

I hope you think this matters.