I have been a vegetarian all my life. Believe it or not, I have never eaten a hamburger, steak, chicken finger or hot dog. I can’t even imagine masticating upon another animal’s flesh. That seems weird to you, doesn’t it? But not to me or to millions of other Americans.
There is little doubt anymore that vegetarianism is going mainstream. In the United States alone, more than 12 million people are vegetarians, and 19,000 more make the switch to a meat-free diet every week.
People eliminate meat from their diets because of health concerns. (Yes, it is a go-zillion times healthier to be a vegetarian than it is to be primarily carnivorous.) I know what you are thinking. “How do you get enough protein?” Reality check: You do not need that much protein in your diet. You need .57 grams of protein for every 2.2 pounds of body weight.
So, you weight lifting people that think you need a gram of protein for every pound in your body, you are so wrong. You are hurting yourself more than you are helping yourself.
What most people do not realize is that having too much protein can cause osteoporosis and kidney stones. Meat and dairy products raise the acid level in human blood, causing the calcium to be excreted from the bones to fix the pH problem.
The excreted calcium ends up in the kidneys, where it often forms kidney stones. Still think you need to meat to get enough protein? Think again. The human body uses 70 percent of the protein content in meat and 65 percent of it in soybeans.
It may seem a tad crazy to you, but food yeasts (nutritional yeast and brewer’s yeast [yes, I just made reference to beer] for example) are a viable source of protein. They are 50 percent protein, whereas most meats are merely 25 percent.
So, instead of indulging in a piece of another living creature who most likely perished and lived a really crappy life just so your meal could taste good, gnaw on a loaf of bread or have beverage which includes brewer’s yeast.
Making the switch to vegetarianism is beneficial to you and to the animals who suffer needlessly. Many people switch out of concern for animal welfare.
Some animals live their entire lives in cages or stalls only to have a painful death. The animals live in places where slaughter workers admit to routinely strangling, beating, scalding, skinning and dismembering fully conscious animals. The workers do this not every once in a while, but routinely.
Meat production employs ecological arguments as well. United States factory farms produce more than 1.4 billion tons of animal waste.
That may not seem like a lot on the grand scheme of things, but that amount is 130 times more than what humans produced.
Yeah, so there’s a lot of cow crap flowing into our rivers and polluting everything. Great. Just think about how many times you urinate or take a dump and do it twice as much. Then dump it back into your own drinking water.
Although animal waste is a big issue, there are several others — world hunger, for one.
More than 70 percent of the U.S. grain harvest goes to feed livestock. If half of the American population would eat half as much meat as they do now, amazingly enough, world hunger would be solved and there would still be plenty to go around.
So, if people weren’t so entirely selfish and over-indulgent then world hunger would end!
I am not saying that everyone and their dog should go vegetarian, but I am saying the entire meat production industry needs to be revamped. On a final note, please don’t forget that you eat to live, you don’t live to eat.
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