Becoming A Vegan
Becoming a vegan is a big decision for a lot of people and the ones that go ahead and do it are often met with a lot of resistance form family and friends. Going vegan means that you choose to no longer consume any kind of product that comes from an animal. That means no dairy, no meat, no eggs, no leather, no fur and so forth. It means entirely cutting these products out of your life and committing to not only a diet but to a way of living that is kinder to animals and kinder to you. For some people vegan is a moral decision - one based on the cruel practices of the agriculture and meat industries and the way they treat the animals. Organizations like PETA and similar resources make it their job to keep people informed and aware about the types of foods they are eating and what the cost is of obtaining them. For other people it’s a matter of protecting the environment. The meat and dairy industries use huge amounts of resources every year to keep their profits high and much of it could be avoided if everyone switched to a vegan diet. Still for many people going vegan is simply a matter of wanting to be as healthy as possible. Many people that choose a vegan lifestyle have enormously better health than meat-eaters do and a lot of them report lots of improvements like better memory and concentration, more energy, better sleeping habits, and so forth.
When it comes to health the improvements are pretty amazing. Not having dairy and meat in your diet can make a big difference in the way that your body is able to keep itself healthy. Since humans aren’t really designed to be able to digest meat and dairy when you stop putting those things in your body you’re able to clear out such substances and give your body a chance to clean itself from the inside out instead of giving it more toxins to try to cope with and remove. We don’t produce enough stomach acid to digest meat and we don’t create the enzyme that digests dairy products so it’s really difficult for our body to break down and a lot of it can get stuck in our digestive system and cause lots of ongoing problems.
These kinds of products can also make it more difficult to exercise properly, can keep your sinuses in a state of disarray and can generally make your life a lot harder than if you were to not consume them. Animal products are also significantly linked to higher rates of cancer and degenerative diseases as well as lots of ongoing health problems and many allergies are related to the consumption of milk products early in life. Many young people decide to go vegan because of the extra energy and the improved ability to study that you can get from changing your eating habits this way - it can also keep your skin and hair looking really nice which many people find to be an important benefit as well. The mental benefits alone can be worth the change to going away from animal products and many people often find that after switching to a vegan diet they lose their interest in eating animal products and don’t want to go back.
For the people that want to switch to a vegan diet because of animal reasons a lot of it has to do with the way that animals are treated in the modern meat industry which is often very cruelly and inhumanely. Many people can’t justify eating an animal that lived a terrible, fear-ridden life, and others have a hard time digesting the thought of all the chemicals the meat industry uses as well. A lot of growth hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals are used in the meat industry and many of those end up in our bodies when we eat the animals and drink milk or eat dairy products. These chemicals can be very dangerous and can also be detrimental to the way our immune system functions and our ability to fight disease. PETA has a lot of information on the inner workings of the meat industry and much of what we’ve learned about it is pretty terrible if not downright appalling. For a lot of people that is reason enough to switch over to a vegan diet and to stick to it - many people make the change after seeing some of the photos or videos from within the industry and who can blame them - it’s pretty awful how the animals are treated.
Many people switch to a vegan diet to help protect the environment. It takes a fraction of the amount of water (less than a percent) to produce a pound of potatoes than it does to produce a pound of beef and the meat and dairy industry are extremely hard on the planet. More chickens are killed each year than there are people on the planet and all those animals (along with the billion cattle that are on the face of the earth) need food and water and take up room. More than half of the grain that is grown in America is used to feed animals and the cattle in the U.S. alone produce over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of waste every day - most of which gets washed into streams and rivers and lakes which kills the plant and fish life there and causes the delicate balance of the water ecosystems to be disrupted. Plus the water that these cattle and other animals consume is tremendous. Trillions of gallons of water are removed from the aquifer that runs through the great plains in order to provide for them and because that water comes from melted glaciers, once it’s gone - its gone. On top of all of that they take up tremendous space, these cattle, and much of the grain that is used to feed these animals could go to people in impoverished, starving countries.
So not only is being vegan great for your health it’s also kinder to the animals and much kinder to the planet. If every family cut back their meat consumption to just one night a week it would drastically change the way our country consumes food and it could help a lot of other people in the world as well.