Vegan

10 Best Reasons to Go Vegan

Vegetarianism is the practice of a diet that excludes meat. The Vegan diet is a form of vegetarianism which excludes all animal products from the diet, such as meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, eggs, and honey.

What is a Vegan?

Vegan [vee-gn]: Veganism denotes a philosophy and way of living that seeks to exclude, as far as possible, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, nonhuman animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, nonhumans and the environment.

1.  Be Skinny and Full of Energy!!

Vegetarians are, on average, up to 20 pounds lighter than meat-eaters and have much more energy!

Every time you eat factory-farmed meat, eggs, or dairy, you are eating antibiotics, pesticides, steroids and hormones that are used to keep the animals alive and fat in unsanitary crowded conditions. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lists approximately 1,700 drugs approved for use in animal feed, of which 300 include “weight gain” in their description.

2. Don’t Support Cruel and Abusive Practices

Every vegan saves more than 100 animals a year from horrible abuse.

On today’s factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, play in the dirt, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won’t even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter. Nearly 19,000 animals are slaughtered in the United States alone each MINUTE , 27 million each day, for a total of 10 billion animals per year!

3. Help Feed the World

Eating meat doesn’t just hurt animals; it hurts people too. If everyone in the United States was to convert to vegetarianism, we could feed 1.3 billion people with the grain and soybeans we feed to livestock every year. 1.3 billion people every year—meaning we could feed our nation plus a billion other people.

4. Save the Planet

Eating meat is one of the worst things that you can do for the Earth; it’s wasteful, it causes enormous amounts of pollution, and the meat industry is one of the biggest causes of global warming. If every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

  • 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
  • 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
  • 70 million gallons of gas — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
  • 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
  • 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

  • Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
  • 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
  •  4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
  • Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

5. Heart Disease – Our #1 Biggest Killer!

A vegetarian diet is great for your health! According to the American Dietetic Association, vegetarians are less likely to developheart disease, cancer, diabetes, or high blood pressure than meat-eaters.

Going Vegan reduces your risk of heart disease by 50% and cancer by 40%.   Dr. Dean Ornish, a Cardiologist with a 100% success rate for unclogging peoples’ arteries and preventing and reversing heart disease promotes a vegan diet and has documented his findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association and in the British journal, The Lancet. Animal products are the main source of saturated fat and the ONLY source of cholesterol in the diet. Vegans consume a cholesterol-free diet! Many studies also show that replacing animal protein with plant protein reduces blood cholesterol levels.

6. Cancer – Our #2 Biggest Killer!

Breast cancer rates are dramatically lower in countries where diets are typically plant-based. When people from those countries adopt a Western, meat-based diet, their rates of breast cancer soar. Vegans also have significantly less colon cancer than meat eaters. Meat consumption is more closely associated with colon cancer than any other dietary factor. Why do vegan diets help protect against cancer? First, they are lower in fat and higher in fiber than meat-based diets. But there are other important factors also. For example, vegans usually consume more of the plant pigment beta-carotene. This might help to explain why they have less lung cancer. Also, at least one study has shown that natural sugars in dairy products may raise the risk for ovarian cancer in some women. Some of the anti-cancer aspects of a vegetarian diet cannot yet be explained. For example, researchers are not quite sure why vegans have more of certain white blood cells, called “natural killer cells,” which are able to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

7. Meat Is Disgusting

It’s disgusting but true: Meat is dead flesh often contaminated with feces, blood, and other bodily fluids and full of preservatives to keep it “fresh” until it reaches your plate. Animal products are the top source of food poisoning in the US. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tested supermarket chicken flesh and found that 96 percent of Tyson chicken was contaminated with campylobacter, a dangerous bacteria that causes 2.4 million cases of food poisoning each year, resulting in diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain, and fever.

8. Got Milk?

Humans are the only species that drink milk after they are weened and from another species. At about the time when we should be weened off breast milk, our bodies stop producing lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose (the sugar found in dairy). One of the reasons the majority of the world population suffers from lactose intolerance is because we’re not able to digest it. Frank A. Oski, when chief of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said that evidence suggests that around 50% of all U.S. children are allergic to cow’s milk, with most of these allergies going undiagnosed. Milk and dairy products have been linked to all sorts of diseases – Breast, prostrate and ovarian cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, autism, colic, allergies, anemia, acne, attention deficit disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, and osteoporosis – just to name a few.

9. World Peace

Mahatma Ghandi claimed that “the most violent weapon on earth is the table fork,” and Albert Einstein claimed that “nothing willbenefit human health and increase chances for survival on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” Their points? That eating is our most fundamental social ritual, our most basic natural need, and in order to sow the seeds of peace, one should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Great minds including Gandhi, Einstein, Buddha, Margaret Mead, Benjamin Franklin, Pythagoras, Leonardo da Vinci, Pluto, Plutarch, Susan B. Anthony, and many more have abstained from eating animal products and argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a more peaceful place.

10. All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

Famous Vegans include: Casey Affleck, Joaquin Phoenix, Summer Phoenix, Moby,  Pamela Anderson, Carrie Underwood, Gillian Anderson, Portia De Rossi, Natalie Portman, Ellen Degeneres, Ed Begley, Jr., Emily Deschanel, Ginnifer Goodwin, Woody Harrelson, Daryl Hannah, Carrie-Anne Moss, Alicia Silverstone, Olivia Wilde, Fiona Apple, Erykah Badu, Bryan Adams, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, Lenny Kravitz, Jared Leto, Alanis Morissette, Prince, Shania Twain, Petra Nemcova, Chris Martin, Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000), and Toby Maguire….just to name a few.

Sweet Cheeks Vegan Bakery’s Favorite Links

Animal Rights Sites

Sweet Cheeks Vegan Bakery’s Favorite Books