Vegetarians vs. Meat Eaters

Whether or not to be a vegetarian has always been a widely debated issue.  There seem to be a wide range of pros and cons on both sides of the spectrum. Today will discuss the positives of vegetarianism.

In an article in the Vegetarian Times, titled “22 Reasons to Go Vegetarian Right Now- benefits of vegetarian diet,” Norine Dworkin discusses the positives of living the vegetarian lifestyle:

  • Vegetarians usually live about 7 years longer
  • a British study that tracked 6,000 vegetarians and 5,000 meat eaters for 12 years found that vegetarians were 40 percent less likely to die from cancer during that time and 20 percent less likely to die from other diseases.
  • The average bone loss for a vegetarian woman at age 65 is 18 percent; for non-vegetarian women, it’s double that.
  • The EPA estimates that nearly 95 percent of pesticide residue in our diet comes from meat, fish and dairy products.
  • Vegetarians have a more regular digestion cycle. Eating a lot of vegetables necessarily means consuming fiber, which pushes waste out of the body.

Jonathan Safran Foer was interviewed about his book, “Eating Animals” by  Elizabeth Weise who writes for USA Today.  He says, “My book is not a case for vegetarianism. It’s a case against factory-farmed meat. Basically, that’s meat where animals are raised in enclosures, where they don’t get to see the sun, don’t get to touch the Earth, and they’re almost always fed drugs to keep them from getting sick or make them grow faster.”

Factory farmed meat has been an ever-growing issue in the United States.  As people have become more aware of where their food is coming from, there has been a stronger resistance to the ample amounts of “cheap meat” on the supermarket shelves.

http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2001/06/images/farm1.jpg