Why Be Vegetarian?

[Guest G.Kaur]

21 REASONS for being VEGETARIAN

Vegetarianism is the fastest growing trend in the developed world. Here are 21 reasons why you should think about turning green too.

* Avoiding meat is one of the best and simplest ways to cut down your fat consumption. Modern farm animals are deliberately fattened up to increase profits. Eating fatty meat increases your chances of having a heart attack or developing cancer.

* Every minute of every working day, thousands of animals are killed in slaughter-houses. Pain and misery are common. In the US alone, 500,000 animals are killed for meat every hour.

* There are millions of cases of food poisoning recorded every year. The vast majority are caused by eating meat.

* Meat contains absolutely nothing - no proteins, vitamins or minerals - that the human body cannot obtain perfectly happily from a vegetarian diet.

* African countries - where millions are starving to death - export grain to the developed world so that animals can be fattened for our dining tables.

* 'Meat' can include the tail, head, feet, rectum and spinal cord of an animal.

* A sausage can contain ground up intestines. How can anyone be sure that the intestines are empty when they are ground up? Do you really want to eat the content of a pig's intestines?

* If we eat the plants we grow instead of feeding them to animals, the world's food shortage will disappear virtually overnight. Remember that 100 acres of land will produce enough beef for 20 people but enough wheat to feed 240 people.

* Every day, tens of millions of one-day-old male chicks are killed because they will not be able to lay eggs. There are no rules about how this mass slaughter takes place. Some are crushed or suffocated to death. Many are used for fertilizer or fed to other animals.

* Animals who die for your dinner table die alone, in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is merciless and inhumane.

* It's much easier to become (and stay) slim if you are a vegetarian. (By 'slim', I do not mean 'abnormally slender' or 'underweight' but rather, an absence of excess weight!)

* Half the rainforests in the world have been destroyed to clear ground to graze cattle to make beefburgers. The burning of the forests contributes 20% of all green-house gases. Roughly 1,000 species a year become extinct because of the destruction of the rainforests. Approximately 60 million people a year die of starvation. All those lives could be saved because those people could eat grain used to fatten cattle and other farm animals - if Americans ate 10% less meat.

* The world's fresh water shortage is being made worse by animal farming. And meat producers are the biggest polluters of water. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat. If the US meat industry wasn't supported by the taxpayer paying a large proportion of its water costs, then hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound.

* If you eat meat, you are consuming hormones that were fed to the animals. No one knows what effect those hormones will have on your health. In some parts of the world, as many as one on four hamburgers contain growth hormones that were originally given to cattle.

* The following diseases are commoner among meat eaters: anemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostrate, constipation, diabetes, gallstones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, piles, strokes and varicose veins. Lifelong vegetarians visit hospital 22% less often than meat eaters and for shorter stays. Vegetarians have a 20% lower blood cholesterol level than meat eaters and this reduces heart attack and cancer risks considerably.

* Some farmers use tranquillizers to keep animals calm. Other routinely use antibiotics to starve off infection. When you eat meat you are eating those drugs. In America, 55% of all antibiotics are fed to animals and the percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin went up from 14% in 1960 to 91% in 1988.

* In a lifetime, the average meat eater will consumer 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and turkeys. Do you want that much carnage on your conscience?

* Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. How would you like to spend your last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animal and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber. Anyone who eats meat condones and supports the way animals are treated.

* Animals which are a year old are often far more rational - and capable of logical thought - than six week old babies. Pigs and sheep are far more intelligent than small children. Eating dead animals is barbaric.

* Vegetarians are fitter than meat eaters. many of the world's most successful athletes are vegetarian.

Source: http://www.giveusahome.co.uk/articles/vegetarianism.htm

Some quotes:

“It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living, by its purely physical effect on the human temperament, would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”

— Albert Einstein

"There will never be any peace in the world as long as we eat animals." -Isaac Bashevis Singer

"If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals." -Albert Einstein

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals." -Henry Thoreau:

"Flesh eating is simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an

act which is contrary to moral feeling: killing. By killing, man

suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity,

that of sympathy and pity towards living creatures like himself and by

violating his own feelings becomes cruel." "As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields." -Leo Tolstoy

"If man wants freedom why keep birds and animals in cages? Truly man

is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the

death of others. We are burial places! I have since an early age abjured

the use of meat." -Leonardo-da-Vinci

“My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension.”

— Benjamin Franklin

http://www.vegetarianimage.com/Quotes.htm

Meet your Meat -----------------> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIjanhKqVC4

[rav_singh]

nice post

should get some people thinking. if only all meat eaters knew this

wjkk wjkf

[Harjeet.Singh]

Exellent video, it's just so disgusting how these animals are slaughtered. I look it this way, if there was someone lying dead on the floor, you wouldn't just pick them up and eat them would you. Well there are some cannibals but they are a minority.

Some of the most strongest animals in the world are elephants, gorrilas. They have only a vegetarian diet. While they have found some gorillas eating meat, it was only in a survival situation, where they had no other sources of food.

Correct me if im wrong, but aren't Sikh's allowed to eat meat only if there is no other food availible? Although that would be rare, because we can eat bark off trees, and even grass if we want. But if we absoulutely have to, then we can kill animals, that have been killed painless as possible, ensuring it was killed with only onle blow to the head, and died immiedietly. The the animal suffered we cannot eat it.

It is so rare anyway that we'd need to eat meat, there is an abundance of vegetables. There was a story of a man who was stuck in the middle of an ocean, and his mind changed the types of food he liked, and he started getting the fish out of the water and eating its eyes, and other things you wouldn't usually eat from meat.

I think eating meat should only be a last resort, even if you felt really ill you should leave it, till you know you have no other choice, and also if that animal had it's own babies that cannot fend for itself it shouldn't be killed. But still its rare you would be in such a situation. When you have no food, your body goes into "survival mode" and gets its protien from your muscles.

Animals with short intestines are the ones that usually eat meat, animals with intestines that if stretched out would be longer than their body, like us humans are the animals that usually eat only vegetarian food.

The reason we have the ability to eat both meat and vegan, is because, its a test to see if we are sinners. As with all sins it feels good when you are doing it, but then afterwards you feel like crap. Like if you have had meat then you get bad diarrhea afterwards. Its the same as lust.

Also, we should only eat what we need and not be greedy, its a fact that most people crap out all the nutrients that they eat, because simply we eat to much. I became a vegetarian only 2 weeks ago, and before my wrists kept clicking and i wasn't growing for months, now as soon as i became vegetarian, i grew a few centimetres and my wrists don't click anymore when i move them.

[er_gurjot]

i take a pledge.. i go veg from now

[SATORi]

...your body is not designed to intake meat, fullstop. I'll never take meat, even if it's the last resort -- nature has it's givings. If not, so be it.

[lovekhalistan]

Nice post

[Harvinder singh Babbar]

nice post. fateh

[jasleen k]

...your body is not designed to intake meat, fullstop. I'll never take meat, even if it's the last resort -- nature has it's givings. If not, so be it.

that's not true. what about people who live in climates which do not allow pure vegetarian diets? what about primitive and nomadic peoples who do not have the capability to grow crops?

our teeth and digestive system are clearly designed for an omnivorous (veg and/or non veg) diet.

HOWEVER, in the modern world, we are lucky to have the convenience of being able to eat a purely vegetarian diet and still get our necessary proteins (dal, dairy, soy, etc), so it is no longer necessary to consume meat for most people.

for me, there's only one reason that matters when it comes to not eating meat. Guru ji's hukam.

[fortunate]

couldn't of agreed more Jasleen K :TH:

[SATORi]

If you insist that your life is about what your body is doing, you do not understand why you came here. At least do something that pleases you – that speaks of who you are and stay in accordance with that.

Then perhaps, you can stay out of resentment and anger toward those you imagine are keeping your from your joy.

What your body is doing is not to be discounted. (Whatever it may be) It is important, too. But not in the way that you think. The actions of the body were meant to be reflections of a state of being, not attempts to attain a state of being.

In the true order of things one does not do something in order to be happy – one is happy and, hence, does something. Thus, the soul’s decision precedes the body’s action in a highly conscious person. Only an unconscious person attempts to produce a state of the soul through something the body is doing.

The truth is that most people act unconsciously; they get sick and they can’t even figure out what hit them. It feels as though it’s the act of ‘Satan’ or a consequence for an ‘evil’ doing, rather than that they did something to themselves.

People smoke and wonder why they get cancer. People ingest animals and fat and wonder why they get blocked arteries. People stay angry all their lives and wonder why they get heart attacks.

The truth is that, most people worry themselves to death, and in terms of spiritual aspects, you gain these “characteristics” from the flesh we ingest into our bodies.

This body which we’ve been gifted with is virtually to live forever! But no, we’ll deny it, we don’t know it, we don’t want to experience it. We fill our bodies with toxins and poisons and the most absurd substances posing as food, yet this marvelous machine; still runs along with you. It’s brutal if you come to think of it.

Truth is truth, the body was not meant to ingest meat or even intake alcohol. It’s literally suicide if one does consume such, according to me. I see no difference than the animal and human in terms of their ultimate reality. I don’t see why I should “kill” myself to stay “alive”.

what about primitive and nomadic peoples who do not have the capability to grow crops?

You’re approaching this through their perspective of the world; these so-called primitive beings see themselves as a one-part being, that is, in terms of the human body alone. Their intelligence is what they rely on, nothing more, because they do not have the understanding yet, they have not evolved higher into different states of awareness of who and what they truly are. Thus, they’ll react out of what they know only. We on the other hand, have been gifted far better understanding and perception. Our intuition is very magnificent, too. Yet we still doubt it, we doubt who and what we really are; and are always ready to forsake that truth in the moment of survival.

As spiritual beings, or highly evolved beings, you’ll perceive this whole world differently from what we’ve thought it to be.

But we’ve also labeled the Red Indians and various old cultures as primitive, yet they were in more contact with the ‘spirit of nature’. They would communicate and ask for permission with the plants before they’d even pluck it, same goes with animals. I guess we don’t even know why they did that. The African cultures, of which, some am aware of, still practice this to-date. And we think we’ve advanced… pfft! We’ve lost the whole plot!

our teeth and digestive system are clearly designed for an omnivorous (veg and/or non veg) diet.

Have you ever looked at our digestive system? We as humans right now have a huge variety of dishes to munch on, which uses all our teeth, irrespective of it being carnivorous or herbivorous. We’re magnificent creates! Best of both worlds. Herbivores would have problems eating some of the foods which we eat today, just like carnivores have problems with some of our foods (in both cases, the food is regarded as vegetarian). Their teeth system doesn’t allow them to experience the eating of food as we do, truly a gift for us.

What’s “true” or “false” to you depends on who you think you are, and what you are trying to do. If your objective is to live a life of peace, joy, and love, violence doesn’t work for you then, it’s even practically proved. If your objective is to live a life of good health and great longevity, consuming dead flesh, smoking known carcinogens, and drinking large sums of nerve-deadening brain-frying liquids does not work, too.

Our motives play a great and important role in our lives. Objectives determine outcomes. Life proceeds out of your intention. Your true intention is revealed in your actions, and your actions are determined by your true intention. Can you see the circle now?

You therefore, are the one to be propelling your life in whichever direction you deem is defining who you are. It’ll least bother me.

I'd recommend everyone to read the following book: A Diet for A New America by John Robbins