Why You Should Be a Vegetarian

If I told you that you were, on a daily basis, consuming food that could potentially give you serious health issues, would you still eat it? The human body is in fact, designed to sustain a vegetarian diet. Most of you are, on a daily basis eating meat, poultry or fish – which have also been linked to a large number of chronic diseases and cancers. Alongside this, animals are treated extraordinarily cruelly and inhumanely when it comes to satisfying us humans. This is wrong and needs to be fixed
People should be treated equally because it is wrong to make them suffer. Plain and simple yes? So why shouldn't we treat animals equally? Do you think that we should treat animals differently because they have different genes and look different to us? The interests of animals should be treated the same as the interests of humans. The interests of the animals that we eat not suffering and dying, is much greater than our interests in eating them. Some may think that eating meat is part of the food chain, that it is part of nature. It is, but there are a number of bad things in nature; disease, war etc. Just because it exists in nature does not make it a good thing.
All the nutrition needed from meat can come from foods such as walnuts, peanuts, soy, eggplant, tofu, eggs and hummus. Another common misconception is that animals kill other animals in order to survive. They don’t have a choice. We do. Bottom line, if we believe that the interest of all living things that can suffer should be treated equally, then we need to treat the interests of animals equally. They don't want to suffer, they don’t want to be killed and we don’t have worthwhile reason to do it. Sure they might taste good, but we can't do what we want to animals just to get some physical pleasure out of it.
Don’t you reckon that it’s a bit ironic how we call some pets, and others dinner? In 2007, from April-June, 2,000,000 cattle, 3,000,000 sheep, 5,000,000 lambs and 114,000,000 chickens were slaughtered in Australia. Millions and millions of animals are suffering unnecessarily at the hands of meat traders by enduring cruel, drawn-out journeys across the world to be slaughtered on arrival. Graphic footage has revealed that animals including horses, pigs, sheep and chickens are seen being transported thousands of kilometres across the world, live. Thousands of animals die en route from disease, heat exhaustion, hunger and stress. The others escape the intolerable conditions only to confront the butcher's knife.

If this hasn’t already convinced you, did you know that every part of the human digestive system points toward a vegetarian diet? Digestion beings in the mouth, yes?. If we examine the tooth and jaw structure of humans, our teeth in comparison to those of a tiger or a panther are extraordinarily different. Human teeth are flat or slightly rounded - designed to grind plant material, not tear into the carcass of an animal. Carnivores can only move their jaws in up and down motions, whereas herbivores, like cows and horses can move their jaws up and down and side to side, allowing for the grinding of leaves and plants. Humans have the tooth and jaw structure which most closely resembles a herbivore - not a carnivore.

Not only are human intestines long and coiled, making digestion for meat slow, the human mouth produces a salivary enzyme known as alpha-amylase. The purpose of this enzyme is to break down complex carbohydrates, (found in plant foods), into simple sugars. There are no carbohydrates in meats, meaning that a carnivore has no need for this enzyme - yet humans produce it in abundance.
We will now examine why a vegetarian diet helps prevent chronic diseases and cancers. Vegetarians avoid poisonous chemicals including hormones, antibiotics and chemical contaminants found in animal products. These are all linked to food poisoning, immune deficiencies, contamination of a human mother’s breast milk and a surplus of other health problems.
Einstein once said, ‘nothing will benefit the human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet’. I hope that you all thoughtfully reconsider your health and the positive effects vegetarianism can have on your life.