Health Tips # 21 - Some good reasons to become a vegetarian

Here are some extracts from few interesting articles and doctor's opinions, on why you should become a vegetarian, and remain one such for life. Being a vegetarian is certainly one of the best ways to stay healthy throughout your life.

1. Vegetarians live longer, healthier lives. That's a fact. Modern medicine can prolong life and medical science is keeping people alive who would die without transplants, bypasses etc; but what of the quality of life? It's simpler not to eat meat.

2. The more plant foods you eat the less room you have for meat food, which clogs the arteries with cholesterol and strain the kidneys with excess protein and burden the heart with saturated fat.

3. Farm animals receive 30 times the antibiotics than people do. This is not so much to prevent infection - although the cramped factory farm conditions do lead to much sickness but to promote more growth an less feed. We ingest these and the hormones through the flesh we consume.

4. Meat production turns abundance into scarcity. You need an average 16lbs of grain to produce one pound of beef, 6 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of park, 3 pounds of grain to produce one pound of chicken and 5.3 pounds of fishmeal to produce 1 pound of farmed fish, Doesn't it make sense to eat the grain and feed more people? .

5. The iron in animal foods is more readily absorbed than the iron in plant foods. Once this was seen as an advantage but like protein it can be a case of too much of a good thing. Excess iron can be a catalyst in the formation of free radicals, Overloading the body with iron can lead to an increased risk of cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, diabetes and infertility. A vegetarian is likely to have safer revels stored iron.

6. Dead flesh (meat) contains saturated fats, cholesterol, hormones, antibiotics, toxins and absolutely no fibre.

7. Vegetarians have lower incidence of diabetes, kidney disease and gallstones.

8. Animal foods are high in sodium, which causes the blood to retain water. They also cause plaque to build up in the arteries. One in four people in the Singapore has high blood pressure.

9. Your body is designed for a vegetarian diet. The human intestines are 16-29 feet long and winds round and round. This is typical of a herbivore (grass eaters). Carnivores always have short, straight intestines. This means they pass out the write from the meat before it rots. In humans it remains in the digestive system too long.

10. Osteoporosis is a disease of calcium deficiency, which leaves the bones brittle and weak, Yet it is not a disease of low calcium intake but rather a case of losing too much. Excess protein will leach calcium from the bones.

11. Efforts to persuade us to eat fish as an alternative healthier substitute for meat should not let us overlook the fact that fish is still a high fat, high calorie food with no fibre. Fish are often, laden with dangerous toxins, which they absorb from a polluted water environment. Bigger fish eat smaller ones so the toxins build up.

12. Meat = Madness!! Many people in Britain are still afraid that they will be victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nicknamed Mad Cows Disease) caused by beef cattle being fed brain and nerve tissue of scapie-infected sheep. Apart from the immorality of feeding peaceful grass eaters such rubbish, it resulted in the cows passing a disease which causes the brain to swell and soften. Hundreds of people will face this prospect. Do not think this is an isolated case. Fish that die of disease in fish faun ponds are ground up and fed back to their brothers and sisters.

13. Over 12% of children in Singapore are rated as obese. Many more are overweight. Fast food outlets are blamed by many for this rise because of the high fat content of the meals. Vegetarian fed children are seldom overweight and parents report they are less prone to sickness. They may grow slower but end up the almost the same height and healthier.

14. Would the popular sport of fishing be allowed to continue if our lakes, rivers and seas rang out with the screams of wounded and dying fish? Fish do feel pain. They have a complex nervous system. Imagine your own cheek pierced by a hook that then drags you with the full weight of your body out of your environment to suffocate slowly.

15. Baby chicks are sorted male from female at chicken farms. The male chicks are casually thrown in a sack on top of each other and suffocated because they cannot become layers or meat providers.

16. In a study of the Japanese who were, until recently, well known for their longevity and health, it was shown that when they have moved to the USA they soon develop similar rates of heart disease as the Americans. It was concluded that increase in meat eating was the prime cause.

17. You'll be in good company being a Vegetarian- Pythagoras, Socrates, Leonardo de Vinci, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Madonna, Lamina Novratilova, Tina Turner, Vanessa Williams and Paul McCartney to name a few, were or are vegetarians.

18. 24.4% of Singaporeans die of cancer. It has shown that vegetarians worldwide have a lower incidence of cancer especially cancer of the colon.

19. Meat is wasteful. It takes 3.25 acres to satisfy the dietary needs of one meat eater for one year. It only requires one sixth of an acre to feed a full vegetarian for a year.

20. Food poisoning commonly starts from meat or poultry infected with the infamous salmonella and E.coli pathogens. Undercooked meat or reheated meat is full of bacteria. It's safer to eat vegetable, grains, nuts and fruit. How many people do you read of being taken to hospital with food poisoning from an orange?

For more such interesting reasons, please read the content in these links:

http://animalrightskorea.org/vegetarianism/50-good-reasons-to-become-a-vegetarian.html

http://www.flex.com/~jai/articles/101.html

http://www.becomingvegetarian.net/

Cheers!

Imported from: http://pkhari.blogspot.in