It has become increasingly clear in our society that if we want to improve our health and prevent so many of the common health and weight-related disasters, as well as improve the state of our Earth and prevent climate disasters, we need to address our dietary choices.
By now, you are no doubt familiar with the amazing health and environmental benefits of reducing animal products. Perhaps you already consider yourself to be a vegan or plant-based eater. Or perhaps you are just starting your journey in this area to learn how much you can benefit yourself and help our Earth by making dietary changes. Every plant-based meal that you choose saves the lives of animals, reduces your health risks, and minimizes environmental harms. To explore these benefits further, this article will explore the 15 reasons to go vegan for you, the animals, and our Earth!
Vegan Benefits For You
1. Easier Weight Management
It is easier to lose weight when following a healthy whole food vegan diet and it offers a drastic decrease in the chances of being overweight or obese.
2. Reduced Risk of Chronic Diseases
Decrease and even potentially eliminate your chances of heart disease, diabetes type 2, cancers, hypertension, high cholesterol, strokes, and many other debilitating diseases.
3. Improved Longevity
Healthy eating vegans are shown to live longer and in better health, throughout their life and right into their senior years.
4. Reduced Consumption of Chemical Toxins
The lower you eat on the food chain, the fewer environmental toxins you generally ingest. Various toxins accumulate, generally in the fat tissue, in the bodies of animals. Typically, these chemicals are neurotoxins, hormone disruptors, or carcinogenic compounds.
5. Increased Energy and Vitality
You simply feel better and are more energetic, as you eat lower on the food chain. You also eat much higher quantities of critical nutrients like vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and fiber.
Vegan Benefits for the Animals
6. Saves the Lives of Animals
Each year about 10 billion animals are slaughtered for food in North America. Every veggie meal reduces the demand for meat and thus for animals to continue to be produced and lose their lives.
7. Can Help Decrease the Inhumane Slaughter and Transport of Animals
Despite some laws for humane slaughter, most animals suffer unspeakable fates when it comes to being slaughtered due to profit-driving motivation. Never mind the trauma experienced by animals on their way to slaughter, during which countless animals lose their lives horrifically. Hence every meatless meal, reduces the demand to continue killing animals in any way.
8. Can Help Give Animals a Better Life
During the short lives that they have, animals are kept in confined, isolated, unsanitary and even torturous environments. Every time you eat a meatless meal, you can feel good that you did not contribute to these practices.
9. Can Stop Against the Discrimination of Animals
We love and cherish our animal pets and yet have not problem eating other animals, which our society has not accepted as pets. Just as we move towards the elimination of discrimination against humans, we need to move towards eliminating the discrimination against animals, and unjustly playing favorites.
10. Helps Foster Respect For All Life
All life is precious, and not one of us has the right to dictate what or who should or should not be killed. We live in a world of abundant food, where we no longer have to rely on killing other species to survive. Just as we have rights, so do the animals, and it is time we start acknowledging that.
Vegan Benefits for the Earth
11. Helps Preserve Fresh Water Resources
The fresh water on this planet is decreasing and it is estimated that almost 50% of all water consumed in the US goes to factory farming. The less demand for factory farming there is, the more water can go to the people that need it. (*It takes about 100 times more water to produce a pound of beef, than a pound of wheat.)
12. Helps Stop the Pollution of Water
Animal agriculture is responsible for most of the water pollution in North America. The wastes of the animals are continuously dumped untreated into local waterways, polluting water and wreaking havoc on local ecosystems.
13. Helps Stop the Destruction of Forests
The more animal farms are needed, the more forests have to be cleared, changing the landscape and the climate of various locations around the world, most often contributing to climate change.
14. Helps Increase Food Availability
As the world population grows, the demand for food continues to rise. Instead of feeding some people meat, we can feed most people plant products. Think of how much food could go to people, that instead goes to the animals, so that some of us can have meat, while others starve to death.
15. Helps Decrease the Impacts of Climate Change
Methane, which is the natural gas produced by animals is much more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to its heat holding capacity. Animal farms are huge contributors to both climate change as well as general air pollution from all the different gases emitted for the production, slaughter, transport, and preservation of the animals and their flesh afterward.
Conclusion
Ultimately there are many, many more reasons why one may want to become vegan or simply cut down on eating meat and other animal products. This is just a short summary list which I hope gives you something to think about as you ponder the enormous effects your meals have.
In the end, we each have to consult our own conscience and be honest about how our actions impact ourselves and all those around us. We can try to ignore, we can try to look the other way, or pretend certain problems do not exist but in the end, all of our actions have consequences and the quality of our lives will always reflect these.
Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegan diet.
Albert Einstein