Why Go Vegetarian?

People ask themselves why should they be vegetarians? What's wrong with eating animals? Eating meat is healthy, as well as tasty. What damage does meat eating cause? Why should we give up the pleasure of meat?

Social-Ethical Issues

Why does it ethical to not eat animals? Because it is the next stage of the evolution of the human ethics. After World War II, the nations of the western world stopped sending their armies to make wars against each other. Now, after the ideological coma, it is time to stop murdering our cousins too, as we can feed ourselves healthily and tastily without murdering the animals. This may also help in reducing the homicide rate. When there is no value to animal life, there is no value to human life as well. For creating a loving, caring society, we need to act in compassion to the surrounding, not only to ourselves. Like we are not committing crimes just because it’s good for us, we should not commit legal crimes also. When our power will grow, those crimes should turn illegal. Until the Star-Trek food replicators will be invented, we should enjoy only the delicates that don’t taste like murder.

Health Issues

Eating meat leads to cancer amd heart diseases. Heart attacks are America’s biggest killer, killing more than 500,000 people annually. Meat eating raises the risk to get a heart attack, as well as cholesterol excess and high blood pressure. Studies have proved that vegetarians have less risk to suffer various types of diseases and cancer, and outlive meat eaters by 6 years. Vegetarianism is also an automatic cholesterol cutter: Dietary cholesterol, which causes diseases, is only found in animal products. No one has ever died of heart attack with cholesterol level of less than 150. The average vegetarian has 128. Meat eaters also have a higher blood pressure than vegetarians. Besides the lower diseases risk that the vegetarians enjoy, they also have safer food: 60-70% of the food poisonings happen in meat products, which are produced from animals who receive many hormones and antibiotics.

Environmental Issues

The meat-based diet in the western world, especially in the US, has a higher cost than the socio-ethical one: The environment. Today's factory farms are not the quiet and calm farms of the past. Producing a single burger costs enough fossil fuels to drive a small car for 20 miles. Raising animals for food produces much more waste, and need much more water and raw materials than producing plain vegetarian foods. In the  US alone, 260 million acres of forest have been cleared for raising animals for food. The world’s cattle eat food with caloric value that can feed 8.7 billion people! Wonder why there is starvation in the world? Because the greediness of the meat eaters.

Economical Issues

The health and the environmental costs of the meat-based diets are paid by all of us, meat eaters and vegetarians alike. Billions of dollars are lost to the direct costs of the meat eating: healthcare, lost productivity and premature death.

Source for the health, environmental and economical issues: www.taxmeat.com