With just under a month to go until World Vegetarian Week (19-25 May), I thought I’d let you in on our Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Meat. It speaks for itself, so without further ado, here are PETA’s…
Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Meat
1. Helping animals also helps the global poor
While there is ample and justified moral indignation at the diversion of 100 million tons of grain diverted for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) are fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.
2. Eating meat supports cruelty to animals
The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests or do anything that is natural to them. They won’t even feel the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter. Dr. Jane Goodall says, “Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs.”
3. Eating meat is bad for the environment
A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is “one of the … most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” In just one example, eating meat causes almost forty percent more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry “should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.”
4. Avoid the Flu
The World Health Organisation says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming, from foot-and-mouth to SARS, can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.
5. If you wouldn’t eat a dog, you shouldn’t eat a chicken
Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals, able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats or dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, “As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I’m talking about monkeys”. Dr. John Webster of Bristol University found that chickens are capable of understanding cause and effect and that when chickens learn something new, they pass on that knowledge (i.e., they have what scientists call “culture”).
6. Heart Disease - the UK’s number one killer
Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the UK’s three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer and strokes. Doctors Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn, two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease, have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esslesytn’s Prevent & Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success of unclogging people’s arteries and reversing heart disease.
7. Cancer - the UK’s number two killer
Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world’s foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called “the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease.” Dr. Campbell’s best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarise it, Dr. Campbell states that “human studies also support this carcinogenic effect of animal protein, even at usual levels of consumption. … No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein.”
8. Fitting into that itty-bitty bikini
Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. You can be an overweight vegan, of course, and you can be a skinny meat-eater. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters, without dieting. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer-review and taken weight off and kept it off.
9. Global peace
Leo Tolstoy claimed that “vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.” His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than an acquired taste for animals’ flesh. Great humanitarians from Tolstoy to Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.
10. The joy of veggies
As the hot new vegan restaurant Saf has shown, veggies rock. Vegetarians report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a centre-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn’t even know existed. Alicia Silverstone says, “Since I’ve gone vegetarian, my body has never felt better and my taste buds have been opened up to a whole new world. It’s one of the most rewarding choices I’ve ever made and I invite you to join me in living a healthy, cruelty-free lifestyle.”
Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”
Ready to give it a try? Order a free Vegetarian Starter Kit for recipe suggestions, fun facts and more. We’ll be doing lots of exciting things during World Vegetarian Week, so keep checking back for more.
Fruit image: Pre School / CC
Chicken image: Netstate / CC
