The Healthy Vegetarian
Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Health and vegetarianism go together. If this is in any way a surprise, you haven’t been paying attention to the preponderance of nutritional and medical research that advocates a plant-based diet for everyone. A meat based diet is weighted with unhealthy fats, too much protein, and loaded with calories, pesticides, hormones and other chemicals. In dramatic contrast, the vegetarian diet is full of healthful fruits and vegetables, plenty of fiber, tons of nutrients, no saturated fats, and less of other fats. Additionally a far greater variety of foods comprise the plant based diet, making the vegetarian diet not just more healthful, but also more exciting and fun. Hundreds upon hundreds of scientific research articles from around the world demonstrate that vegetarianism is the single most powerful thing individuals can do to promote, protect, or improve their health.
Each year, the meat industrial complex abuses and butchers nearly nine billion cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens, and other innocent, feeling animals, just for the enjoyment of consumers. Each year, nearly 1.5 million of these consumers are crippled and killed prematurely by heart failure, cancer, stroke, and other chronic diseases that have been linked conclusively with the consumption of these animals. Each year, millions of other animals are abused and sacrificed in a vain search for a ‘magic pill’ that would vanquish these largely self-inflicted diseases.
Alex Hershaft, PhD, President, Farm Animal Reform Movement.
Heart disease is one of the world’s biggest killers. In developed countries it steals more lives prematurely than all other causes of death combined. 41.6 % of all deaths in the United States last year were caused by cardiovascular diseases and that statistic is similar throughout the world. Worldwide more women die from heart disease than the next seven most common causes of death. A plethora of large scale scientific studies show that a plant-based diet prevents deaths from heart attacks:
- When analyzing 8,300 deaths in the USA, UK and Germany among 76,000 men and women in five different, large studies, researchers concluded that vegetarians have a 24% reduction in death from heart disease (Key, 1998).
- Similarly in the famous Oxford Vegetarian study where 6,000 vegetarians were compared with 5,000 meat eaters over nearly two decades, scientists found that rate of death from heart disease was 28% lower in vegetarians than in meat eaters (Thorogood, 1994).
- Furthermore, vegans, men and women who eat no meat, diary products, or eggs, have a whopping 57% lower incidence of death from heart disease (Thorogood, 1990).
- Do healthy meat eaters—people who don’t smoke, who exercise a lot and consume a low-fat meat diet—enjoy the same heart healthy benefits provided by the vegetarian diet? Scientists compared vegetarians to healthy meat eaters, and vegetarians still had far lower rates of both heart disease and deaths from heart disease (Mann, 1997), (Chang-Claude, 2005).
For more information regarding other health factors, such as:
- Cholestrol
- Blood Pressure
- Stroke
- Cancer
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Osteoporosis