Not too long ago, a famous pop star caused a minor stir when he suggested that one step everyone could take towards helping the environment would be to abstain from meat for one day a week. That’s all he asked – that we adopt a low fat vegetarian diet for a single day out of the week. A few papers took him seriously, but most of them just laughed.
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.
Looking at the subject from an environmental standpoint, there are a number of reasons to turn away from eating meat on the scale most consume it, especially beef. Raising beef cattle requires enormous amounts of arable land that could produce far more nutritional food than the cattle can. This is a fact established by hard data that no one can truthfully deny.
If you have a very strong stomach, pay a visit to a meat processing plant. These are all located far away from large populations for a reason. They smell so bad, they literally make people sick. Those who are unfortunate enough to have to work in the plants or live nearby them have a higher than average incidence of a number of health complaints.
If you do manage to get inside and see what beef processing involves, you literally may end up having nightmares. There is nothing remotely humane about the mass slaughter of these animals. OK, technically this is not an environmental concern, but it is certainly an ethical one. Those pretty packages of beef you see on the supermarket shelf won’t look the same to you after you have seen how they were made to get that way. You won’t be laughing about a vegetarian diet any more, that’s for sure!
Bear in mind that the cattle industry wants you to buy their product and will tell you anything to get you to buy it. They will tell you that you need the protein. Yes, you do need a certain amount of protein in your diet, but not that much protein and not that kind of protein. While a strong argument can be made for an occasional serving of meat, so many consume far too much and it is a proven contributor to innumerable diseases.
Those who have given up meat and taken up a high protein vegetarian diet rarely feel the need to go back to eating meat. While some do go back to occasional servings of meat, they almost never go back to consuming it in large quantities. Why should they? They feel healthier and happier than they did before.
The two largest religions in the world, Buddhism and Hinduism, both advocate a total abstinence from meat eating. Interestingly enough, all the other major religions, including Catholicism, Judaism, and the Muslim faith advocate abstinence from meat during certain religious holidays. Why is it that only the cattle industry advocates a strict meat eating diet?
A vegetarian diet meal plan is no laughing matter. Give this a little credit for trying to open people’s eyes to the low carb vegetarian diet.