Why vegetarian? ...2- Health

Vegetarianism isn’t just about the ethics of eating animals or about animal rights. Many people reduce or even completely eliminate their meat intake for purely health-related reasons. In fact, I’ve actually met more vegetarians and vegans who follow their diet for heath reasons than for ethical reasons.

Some health issues that arise from meat and dairy consumption include high cholesterol, clogged arteries, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, Mad Cow Disease, salmonella infection, E.Coli and many more diseases, with new risks being discovered fairly frequently. Recent studies report health issues including bone disease, osteoporosis, Alzheimers disease and prostate, colon and breast cancer.

A whole other group of health vegetarians don’t necessarily have a problem with eating meat or with the main health risks with meat specifically, but worry about the drastically increasing amount of steroids and chemicals found in meat and dairy products today. Steroids injected into animals to bulk them up, and then found in the packaged meat products, are then ingested by humans, causing bacteria to become immune to those steroids (antibiotics), contributing to creating the “super bugs” we’re facing today.

A cow is injected with steroids to ward off
diseases that infest factory farms and
to create more meat for after slaughter.

Research shows that the steroids children ingest from meat are gradually causing children to go through puberty at much younger - unhealthy - ages and is being linked to childhood obesity. Some studies even link them to depression and other increasingly common childhood “disorders.”

Rather than go through every single health risk people believe is associated with meat and dairy consumption, here’s a list of some of the key issues:

1. Steroids
The issue about steroids I touched on briefly above, but visit The Food Web for some more detailed information.

2. Disease, bacteria
This I also mentioned above, but the site "Eating Meat Makes You Sick" is a great place for information about diseases and illnesses from various kinds of meat.

3. B12
B12 is a vitamin that is essential for life. Our bodies naturally produce the vitamin, but to have enough, we must consume it on a daily basis. B12 is most commonly found in the earth. The second best source used to be in meat (because animals eat the grass that grows from the earth), but with factory farming being the main source of meat today, B12 has become quite scarce. Very low B12 levels can cause anaemia and nervous system damage. Enough B12 in a person’s diet can help minimize the potential risk of heart disease and pregnancy complications. For this reason many people choose to reject meat and get their B12 and other essential vitamins and minerals from non-fatty sources instead, such as fortified soy milk.

4. Calcium
The kind of calcium found in cow’s milk is a very different form of calcium than that found in vegetables such as kale or broccoli. Dairy calcium, from a glass of milk for instance, actually requires more of the body’s calcium and other resources to digest it than a person will actually gain from drinking that glass of milk.

5. Dairy
Many people argue that it’s not healthy to drink cow’s milk because it’s not a natural food for human beings. No other species (other than humans) drinks milk past infancy. Also, no other species drinks another species’ milk. Many scientists argue that it is extremely unhealthy for humans to be drinking such a fatty substance after infancy; milk is full of fat because babies need all the vitamins, minerals and fatty acids they can for early development and growth. However, scientists argue, 40-year-olds (or even 10-year-olds) do not need this and should not be consuming such a high amount of fat. “The China Study” is a book based on a study done on Asian people and their diets. Most Asian people cannot digest dairy products. The researchers suggest that this is because human beings are actually not designed to be able to digest another species’ milk, but that we’ve evolved over time and become tolerant of it. Their argument actually makes a lot of sense, especially considering there are still many people in the U.S. that are to this day lactose intolerant. Check out NotMilk.com to read up on all the heath issues and risks scientists are discovering about milk.

There are several more main reasons that people choose to become vegetarian or vegan for health. Check out “Inner Self” more information about the advantages of vegetarianism. The article is in no way trying to persuade readers to become vegetarian, just to inform about the health risks involved with some meat products. It’s a very unbiased and really informative report.