Table of Contents
- 10. Vegetarianism Can Help With Weight Loss
- 9. Reduce Your Risk of Foodborne Illness
- 8. Vegetarianism Saves World Hunger
- 7. Vegetarianism Can Prevent Disease
- 6. Vegetarianism Helps You Save Money
- 5. Animals Have no Choice
- 4. Vegetarians Can Also be “Willful”
- 3. Veganism Helps Protect The Environment
- 2. Get More Creative in The Kitchen
- 1. Vegetarianism Helps Women Cope With menopause Calmly
In a world where pork is added to food in a variety of ways, meat products are a staple of all kinds of sports, barbecues, and celebration venues. So sharing vegan food is less appealing.
We have many misconceptions about the vegan lifestyle and the recipes vegans use in their daily lives.
Many people may think that being a vegetarian means:
- Strictly restrict calorie intake
- always feel hungry
- eat very little at each meal
- always feel short of food
- Insufficient intake of nutrients and vitamins due to lack of meat and dairy products
The fact that vegans don’t eat meat doesn’t mean they don’t eat a variety of nutrient-dense foods to keep them full. The fact is quite the opposite. Vegetarianism can provide a lot of vitamins and nutrients compared to a meat-based diet.
One of the added benefits of a refined, nutritious vegan meal is that it’s not as high in fat and calories as a meat-based diet. Vegetarianism can improve people’s quality of life by helping them prevent disease, live longer and energize their bodies.
In addition to this, vegetarianism can also help maintain body shape, which is beneficial for people to improve their self-image and self-confidence. Many of the sought-after celebs’ slender body is the result of their consistent adherence to healthy vegetarian and vegan diets.
The benefits of vegetarianism don’t stop at aesthetics. Removing meat from food is good for the environment, and it can also encourage humans to protect innocent animals from being killed – animals that live in abominable conditions, full of hormones and toxic, before appearing on our respective dinner tables.
There are also many types of vegetarianism, so people can choose which one is the best for them. For those who are trying vegetarianism for the first time, they can also choose one of them to experience before eating any meat.
The different types of vegetarianism are:
- Strict vegetarians: absolutely do not eat meat and dairy products, as well as animal by-products, etc., not even honey, because honey-producing bees are also an animal. Strict vegans are strict about their clothing and resist animal products like silk, leather and wool.
- Dairy-vegetarians: Dairy-vegetarians do not eat meat, but they do eat some dairy.
- Ovo vegetarians: “Ovo” refers to egg foods. Therefore, egg vegetarians will eat some egg products, but they will reject meat and dairy products.
- Vegetarians who eat only white meat (poultry) and no red meat: This type of vegan refuses to eat all meat products except poultry.
- Vegetarians who do not abstain from fish: This type of vegan refuses to eat any meat other than fish and seafood.
- Flexitarians (people who are vegetarian most of the time but also eat meat occasionally): Vegetarians who eat only white meat (poultry) and no red meat, and vegetarians who don’t refrain from fish can be classified in this category . Flexitarians eat as little meat as possible, but they do eat meat occasionally.
Although only white meat (poultry) and no red meat, no fish taboos, and flexitarians do not strictly adhere to a vegetarian diet, they point to the right one for those who are not fully prepared to quit meat.
After learning more about the eating habits of true vegetarians, you do see strict vegan diets as people say. But you’ll also find that maintaining a vegan diet is easier than you might think.
In fact, their diet contains a lot of delicious food to meet the psychological needs of people’s occasional indulgence. With a deeper understanding of this lifestyle, you will find that not only is it not difficult to become a vegetarian, but there will be a range of food options to choose from, not only that, but you can also protect the environment, enhance your physical strength, improve your mentality, and reduce Risk of diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
Here’s an in-depth look at 10 reasons why everyone should be a vegan.
10. Vegetarianism Can Help With Weight Loss
More than half of Americans today are obese. Obesity not only reduces self-confidence and self-satisfaction, but also reduces quality of life and increases mortality due to the risk of heart disease, cancer and stroke.
According to a five-year study published in the Journal of the American Nutrition and Dietetic Association in 2013 revealed that people who do not eat meat have a lower body mass index than those who eat meat, vegetarianism Obesity rates were significantly lower than omnivores at 9.4% and 33.3%, respectively.
In addition, at the 2013 Congress of the American Obesity Society, a new study was announced: If two groups of Obese people were vegetarian and meat eaters over a period of time, and although the total number of calories consumed was the same, the vegetarian group lost more weight.”
The journal Prevention documented a University of South Carolina study that followed different types of vegetarians and found that those surveyed were able to lose weight, especially those who were vegan Activists.
The reason for this is that because meat distributes a lot of saturated fat, eating meat products causes us to eat too many calories, which is the culprit behind weight gain. In contrast, vegans eat complex carbohydrates and a variety of fruits and vegetables, which are low-calorie (some of which are even zero-calorie) foods, yet full because they are high in fiber feel.
Protein-rich nuts and beans, although high in calories, are much lower in calories than meat (especially red meat). In addition, most of the fats in nuts, vegetable oils, and legumes are unsaturated compounds that have protective properties.
9. Reduce Your Risk of Foodborne Illness
Foodborne illness can cause people to be unwell for prolonged periods of time, requiring hospitalization and even death in severe cases. “Vegetarian Times” elaborated on the fact that vegetarians rarely suffer from foodborne diseases. [1]
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 76 million cases of foodborne illness are diagnosed in the United States each year, with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. [2]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims that protein-rich foods such as meat, poultry, fish, and seafood often contribute to foodborne illness outbreaks.[3]
Of course, there are also cases of food-borne diseases caused by eating fruits and vegetables in reality. For example, botulism (a type of food poisoning) occurs when people eat canned food contaminated with toxins.
However, if you follow a true vegan lifestyle, you’ll notice that they don’t eat canned fruits and vegetables because they think the food’s main nutrients are lost during processing.
Vegetarians prefer to eat whole fruits and vegetables, as well as some whole foods rich in carbohydrates and plant protein, thus reducing the dangers of eating processed foods. In addition, proper washing of all-natural foods will also reduce the risk of contracting foodborne illnesses.
But what is worrying is that with the diversification of meat consumption, many restaurants and diets have gradually developed a trend to eat raw meat.
Sushi, steak, and tuna tartare (a cold dish of minced or chopped raw meat or seafood mixed with seasonings) have been added to the menu as some of the foods that are considered delicacies.
These dishes are highly priced and are highlighted with a warning: Eating raw meat, raw fish, and dairy products increases the risk of foodborne illness. But these dishes taste delicious, don’t they?
So people are willing to take this risk even if they spend their whole lives in hospital beds.
8. Vegetarianism Saves World Hunger
Did you know that not eating meat helps prevent famines?
70% of the food in the United States is used to feed animals for future slaughter. America’s 7 billion livestock consume five times as much food as the U.S. population directly consumes. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University in the United States, believes that if all the food now fed to livestock was reserved for human consumption, about 800 million people could be fed. If these grains were exported, about $80 billion a year could be used to boost the U.S. foreign trade balance.
Down to Earth, an organic natural food distributor in Hawaii, agrees, pointing out that thousands of children around the world die of hunger every day, and if everyone joined the vegetarian diet, this situation could be greatly improved. “If everyone ate a vegetarian diet, there would be enough food to feed more than 6.3 billion people worldwide.”
7. Vegetarianism Can Prevent Disease
Coronary heart disease is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Vegetarians prevent such conditions by eating foods that are low in fat and cholesterol. A vegetarian diet can also provide plenty of dietary fiber, which can protect against minor ailments such as rectal cancer and digestive problems.[4]
“Vegetarian Times” cites a study showing that switching to a vegetarian diet can increase life expectancy by 13 years. [5]
More evidence comes from Okinawa, Japan, where residents live longer than the rest of Japan (and possibly even the rest of the world). A nearly 30-year study of more than 600 Okinawan centenarians revealed their secret to longevity: sticking to a low-calorie diet of unprocessed complex carbohydrates and eating fiber-rich fruits, vegetables and soybeans.
6. Vegetarianism Helps You Save Money
Have you ever noticed the products with the word “market price” in the introduction?
These items are usually some kind of meat product, such as steak or seafood. Meat items tend to be much more expensive when eating out, compared to a fraction of the money you’d pay for meat to get you a vegetarian feast.
Also, meat is often a big expense in everyday grocery shopping. Vegetarian foods such as beans, rice, pods, nuts, and other types of grain commodities have a longer shelf life and lower cost.
Some people may worry that products will have a short shelf life, but products like carrots, cauliflower, apples, and oranges tend to have a longer shelf life. Plus, the nutrients that produce provides are worth cooking for a short period of time, or wrapping them in plastic wrap for proper storage.
If you want to stock up on a lot of products and worry that it will spoil before you and your family have time to enjoy it, consider stocking up on some frozen meals. Boxed, unprocessed, frozen vegetables are the best option for this group because they have the closest taste to fresh vegetables.
By doing so, you’ll have enough food in stock to last a while, reducing overhead so you can better control your budget. On the other hand, meat products are expensive and easily spoiled, and meat consumption is also at risk of developing foodborne diseases, which we have discussed before.
5. Animals Have no Choice
Vegetarianism is controversial, and many sources indicate that early hunting Homo sapiens killed livestock and stole their meat in order to survive. The problem now is that we are not cavemen, and the 20th and 21st centuries have brought us many advanced conditions that primitive people did not enjoy.
These conditions include housing, grocery stores and restaurants, clean water, and more. Basically, early Homo sapiens ate as many calories as possible on each hunt because they didn’t actually know when their next meal was coming.
I am happy to hear that people regard the diet of carnivores as the diet of cavemen, because the living conditions of cavemen are extremely difficult and the environment is so harsh that they can only meet their food and clothing needs through hunting and predation. They had no choice in the Ice Age.
We all evolved from cave-dwelling times, so why can’t the way we eat improve with the times?
Animals don’t have a say in their own life or death – they can only be slaughtered. Down to Earth, a distributor of organic natural foods in Hawaii, has a good take on this: “Today on commercial farms there are no laws to protect livestock from brutal slaughter, and if dogs are treated the same way or Cats are illegal.
However, livestock are no less intelligent or pain-sensing than cats and dogs that we cherish as companions. ” True, in fact, we may be at the top of the food chain, but this is How can the killing of innocent livestock be some kind of inevitable path for human development?
Why is it natural to slaughter livestock, while hurting a puppy is so cruel? Humans are perfectly capable of living without consuming meat products, so it’s not worth sacrificing innocent livestock to satisfy one’s own appetite.
4. Vegetarians Can Also be “Willful”
This may seem like the opposite of our point, since earlier in the article we covered a lot of the health benefits of vegetarianism. However, everyone inevitably wants to indulge once in a while, and moderate indulgence is excellent.
Did you know that Oreos are actually vegetarian? It’s a hard truth, and foods like this guilty pleasure include: Nutella peanut cookies, corn flakes, baked treats (unfrosted), Shengmei’s marshmallows (for pastry decorations) , Pillsbury’s Crescent Rolls (that’s okay too?!), Dummy Candies, and more.
There’s nothing wrong with having a big meal once in a while. Some people mistakenly think that vegetarianism means total restriction of all types of food intake, but it is not.
After all, meat and dessert have nothing to do with each other, do they? What’s more, with the increasing popularity of veganism, many bakeries, grocers and restaurants have launched delicious new products, which will satisfy your vegetarian needs and offer a sweet treat for your taste buds.
3. Veganism Helps Protect The Environment
Going vegetarian can not only help more people in the world solve the problem of hunger, but also help reduce environmental pollution, protect water resources, save fossil fuels, and even help protect tropical rain forests.
According to the US Environmental Protection Association (EPA), the chemical and animal waste discharged from commercial farms can pollute more than 173,000 miles of rivers and streams each year. [6]
Farm waste has become the main source of water quality protection today. One of the threats. There are also agricultural activities that cause pollution, including industrial large-scale farming, plowing, pesticide spraying, irrigation, fertilization and harvesting.”
The Whole Earth Vegetarian Catalogue claims that the production of meat products consumes significantly more fuel than the production of vegetarian food such as soy. And the production of animal protein consumes more energy than vegetable protein products. 3 to 15 times the water resources.
In addition, in order to obtain more livestock land and earn more profits, human beings often destroy a large number of tropical rain forests. We must understand that for us, forests are not only a gift from the earth to us, it is a sacred treasure, the trees in it also provide us with the precious oxygen necessary to survive.
2. Get More Creative in The Kitchen
It is really not difficult to maintain a vegetarian diet, however, one of the most essential elements of a vegetarian diet is its food variety. We need to eat a lot of crops, vegetables, legumes and complex carbohydrates to get all the nutrients and vitamins our body needs, and vegetarianism not only provides us with the opportunity to try new foods, but also adds a lot of fun and creativity to the kitchen.
Vegetarians don’t just use food as a substance to sustain life, for them, food is more of an experience of life. The vegan table is always colorful and appetizing, and these vegetables and fruits are not only brightly colored, but also rich in photochemicals and antioxidants that make the entire mealtime more enjoyable.
While vegan diets vary, it doesn’t take much time to prepare a vegetarian meal. You can mix the different ingredients together for a salad, or add the ingredients and olive oil to a skillet for a delicious little stir fry.
There are also plenty of vegan blogs and recipes out there to help you with meal planning freedom, opening the door to a world of delicious, creative, and incredibly accessible food.
1. Vegetarianism Helps Women Cope With menopause Calmly
Even if you haven’t gone through menopause, if you’re a woman, you will sooner or later; if you’re a man, those close to you will go through this chapter of your life. Menopause is a completely natural phase of life, but the symptoms of perimenopause and menopause can make you feel like a nightmare, and even make some women think they have a terrible disease.
The symptoms of menopause can range from mild to severe, but every woman can experience some kind of discomfort during this time. Vegetarian food can slow down the symptoms of menopause, allowing women to live and work normally without affecting their quality of life.
Nutrients found in many vegetarian diets are beneficial for perimenopausal and menopausal women. Some foods are rich in phytoestrogens, plant-based compounds that resemble estrogen and can increase or decrease levels of estrogen and progesterone. Keeping them in balance through diet can help women go through menopause more smoothly and comfortably.
Regardless of changes in diet and health plans, menopausal women will always experience weight gain. A vegetarian diet can avoid this because of its fiber-rich and low-calorie, low-fat properties. Another manifestation of menopause is that bone density will decrease, which may lead to diseases such as osteoporosis.
This can also be solved by vegetarianism, which can help protect bone health. Although many vegetarians cannot eat calcium-rich dairy products, there are other foods that provide a dose of calcium to meet the body’s needs, such as soybeans, tofu, soy milk, and green vegetables such as broccoli, kale, mustard Blue and turnip dish.
To protect bone health, many vegetarian products are fortified with calcium and vitamin D. Vegetarians generally consume a greater variety of vitamins to protect bone health than carnivores.