Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and offer protection against numerous diseases, including the UK's three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer and strokes. Drs Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn have used a vegan diet to achieve per cent success in preventing and reversing heart disease, as chronicled most recently in Dr Esslesytn's Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his success in unclogging people's arteries. Dr T Colin Campbell is one of the world's foremost epidemiological scientists.
His bestselling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. The book, based on a study that The New York Times called "the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease", states, "42820o chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein". A vegetarian diet is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, and vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese.
Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 per cent lighter than meat-eaters.
A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off. Leo Tolstoy claimed that "vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism". His point? People who wish to sow the seeds of peace should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans' acquired taste for animals' flesh. Great humanitarians, from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh, have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.
People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a centre-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables that they didn't even know existed.
Paul McCartney sums it all up: "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty".
Check out PETA. Follow us. Terms Privacy Policy. What allowed me to do so? What might allow others to do the same? Also read: Will more people turn to vegetarianism in a post-coronavirus world?
Scientists have been studying this conflict, between caring for animals and killing them to eat them. And we generally do care for animals. In fact, many of us find what has to happen to animals to produce meat wrong, at least in principle, what little we may know about it, even if we eat meat. Shoppers would visit the counter, eat and admire the pork. Then, the butcher would offer to make more, but to do so he would bring out a live piglet and put the animal in a machine that appeared to instantly grind her up and turn her into fresh meat.
In reality, another prankster was sitting in the machine safely collecting each baby pig. Although customers had just readily eaten pork, they were aghast when they thought a live pig was about to be killed. One woman spat out pork from her mouth, others pleaded with the butcher not to kill the young pig and even tried to physically stop him from doing so. None of them picked up another piece of the free fresh pork that they had eagerly eaten before seeing the live pig.
If you were one of the customers, what would you have done? Also read: How coronavirus, bird flu and rumours to stay off non-veg hit poultry industry hard in India. While many of us are perturbed by the thought of slaughter of any animal, several studies found people who choose to eat animals are inclined to reject the thought that animals are capable of complex emotions and are likely to draw a further line between the emotional capacities of animals usually used for food such as chickens versus those who are not typically eaten by humans like parrots.
Refusing to acknowledge animals, especially animals used for food, have the ability to experience deep emotions, appears to let many of us dismiss what happens to them in the production of food. Through studies conducted by Loughnan and his colleague Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland, the pair describes how vegetarians tend to compare with meat eaters in thinking about the mental faculties of animals when told they will be killed.
In this study, researchers introduced a tree kangaroo to participants—an animal the participating individuals were not familiar with. They were given general information about tree kangaroos and then some were told that the animals were for eating while others were not. Those individuals who were told the species was food considerably regarded tree kangaroos as less deserving of concern than the other participants.
Also read: A Dutch butcher is winning hearts by making plants taste just like meat. Would we have thought differently? In other words, particular species are worthier of respect than other animals just by way of being.
If we are raised in a meat-eating family, or if our families engage in rituals or customs that involve killing or eating certain animals, something similar is usually the repeated messaging we hear too. India needs free, fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism even more as it faces multiple crises.
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