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Why Vegetarianism / Veganism?
- You'll save the lives of 6
cows, 22 pigs, 30 sheep, 800 chickens, 50 turkeys, 15 ducks, 7
rabbits and half a ton of fish.
- You'll help protect yourself
against the most common killer diseases. An animal-based diet
is high in saturated fat, animal protein and cholesterol which raise
the level of cholesterol in the blood - the warning sign for heart
disease and stroke. Vegetarians get up to 57 percent less
heart disease.
- The National Cancer Institute
states that eating vitamins A, C and E from fresh fruit and
vegetables reduces cancers and heart disease. These vitamins
even help keep your brain active in old age! None of these
antioxidants are in meat.
- A vegetarian diet provides all
the nutrients you need for good health - so says the British Medical
Association and US government.
- There are virtually no laws to
protect farm animals from cruelty.
- Meat is an incredibly wasteful
way of producing food. On average just to produce 1 kg of
meat, 10 kg of vegetable protein is used. That vegetable
protein could be fed directly to people instead. This leads to
starvation because people in the wealthy West use so many of the
world's crops to feed their farm animals. And because the West
has so much power it can insist that poorer countries grow food for
the West's animals when they could be growing it for their own
people.
- If everyone in the world went
vegetarian we could feed the whole world and more. If everyone
ate meat we could not even feed half the world's population.
- Almost all pigs are factory
farmed. They are often in dark, barren, overcrowded pens and
suffer from broken bones, abscesses, ruptured stomachs, pneumonia,
meningitis, cuts and wounds which often kill the piglets because
they are not cleaned.
- Chickens are fed antibiotics
every day to try to stop the spread of disease. Up to 100,000
are crammed in sheds. Four fifths have broken bones or
deformed legs and feet by the time they are killed at just six weeks
old.
- Fishing is causing the
ecological collapse of the oceans.
How to Go Veg
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