Adopting a Vegetarian Diet Could be Your First Step Towards Saving Environment
The vegetarian lifestyle is not pleasant to all. While it is a common practice where I live, it seems a nightmare to a large population in most parts of the world. Vegetarianism, simply, is all about avoiding meat-based products and eggs and befriending plant-based food.
This might seem just a dietary choice. But switching to a vegetarian diet can do more good than just gifting you with a healthy lifestyle. It can be your small contribution to saving the environment and building a healthy and compassionate society.
Let’s start with health benefits.
Do you know It takes 36 to 72 hours for intestinal tracts to digest meat completely?
This means the food will be there in your body for over 2–3 days.
When you eat meat, you consume more fat and cholesterol. This further leads to high cholesterol levels and increased chances of heart ailments, strokes, obesity, hypertension, and other chronic diseases. The excess protein intake can also harm the kidney and can cause high blood urea.
How do vegetarian diets help?
Vegetarian diets are rich in fiber, vitamins, and minerals. The diet is known to strengthen the immune system, maintain body mass index (BMI), and slow down the aging process.
An Oxford study shows that vegetarians outlive meat eaters by almost 6 years.
Now, coming to bigger concerns…
You must know that farmers and large food companies sustain livestock to offer meat-based products. The amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the livestock is much more than all the cars and trucks of the world combined. Animals produce 130 times more excrement than the human population. Not only do they emit harmful gases that poison the air around farms, but they also become a cause of global warming. The poisonous air around farms can also cause diseases to the residents.
Maintaining livestock creates more environmental hazards than cultivating crops for vegetarian diets or for direct human consumption. You need space, food, and water.
For maintaining livestock, you need more space. Where do you get the space from when we are dwelling in more and more cities? By stealing homes of wild animals or, in politer words, by cutting down forests. You cut down forests to make room for factory farms. This causes the extinction of many plants and animal species.
Plus, excessive grazing by farm animals erodes the topsoil drying it out and damaging it for growing crops.
We reserve almost half of our grains for livestock. Many countries use 40% of global grain production to feed their livestock. It can go as high as 70% when it comes to richer countries.
If we do the math right, the land area we need to produce 1 tonne of beef can grow 10–20 tons of nutritious food.
Now Imagine If all this crop production was used to feed humans… We could gain 40–70% more food — enough to feed 4 billion people.
And, that’s how you take a step to eradicate a global crisis — world famine.
Talking about water, in the United States, more than half of the water is consumed in animal agriculture.
Farmed animals experience extreme cruel measures that would be illegal and call for protests if happened to our beloved pet dogs and cats. The feelings of these animals are of no less value than those of any other human being or animal.
Then, why should they be exposed to such cruelty?
When we kill animals, we break oneness. We challenge the principles of oneness and unity, we so desperately propagate.
If you are an animal lover, you empathize with animals. We should stand for animal rights and honor their feelings.
It is said that “We become what we eat.” Some studies also show that meat-eating leads to more aggression and violence.
Everything takes effort, determination, and persistence. It is more about a choice and decision.
For meat-lovers, it is a nightmare. Yes, even the thought of replacing meat with plant-based meat is blasphemy.
But we avoid fries, pizza, our favorite nuts, ham, or any other food that might screw our health.
Meat cannot be replaced but there are so many dishes across the world that are meant to be savored. What you need is the internet to explore and ingredients from the supermarket.
Every action counts.
Why wait for some diseases to take over our health and get loaded with medications to take care of our health? Why not start from the beginning?
We hear people calling such arguments flaky. But on a closer look, these are just as solid reasons as to why exercise regularly and why avoid plastics. These arguments are scientifically proven facts and not just random analogies.
Save water, reduce the emission of harmful gas, reduce deforestation, save habitats for wild animals, reduce water pollution, live a healthy lifestyle — all this with just changing our dietary habits.
Even if you cannot stop it altogether, cutting down on your consumption can be a good start. In the end, it is all about initiative.
Small changes lead to big differences.
