Others are concerned not just about their own health, but also about that of our planet. Food production for a vegetarian diet is far less environmentally destructive than that for an animal-based diet. An animal-based diet consumes vastly more fossil fuels, water, and other resources than does a vegetarian diet. Our meat habit is a driving force behind the greenhouse effect, water depletion, rainforest destruction, and other environmental disasters, as well as U.S. dependence on foreign oil. (See Animal Agriculture Fact Sheet #3).
For others, world hunger is the most compelling reason. More than a billion people are starving throughout the world while enough grains and legumes to feed them are fed to American livestock. Enough food to feed the world could be produced in a plant-based system, but an animal-based system cannot feed everyone.
The fastest growing reason for becoming vegetarian, however, concerns the most direct victims of the animal-based diet, the animals killed and eaten as food. So the health and well-being of each consumer, the planet, the world's less privileged, and other animals are all connected and depend upon making the switch from an animal-based to a plant-based food system.
This mortality, coupled with untold crippling and debilitation, means pure self-interest should motivate change in diet. According to M. A. Scharffenberg, M.D., M.P.H., "next to tobacco, the use of meat is the greatest single cause of mortality in the U.S." And in addition to excess fat and cholesterol, meat is laden with toxic residues of pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics.
Interestingly, it is the excessive protein in an animal-based diet, not the moderate level obtained by vegetarians, that poses health risks. In 1990 Cornell University released results of the most comprehensive dietary study ever undertaken.
Six thousand five hundred Chinese were observed and 360 details of their eating habits were recorded. The findings confirm earlier indications that the higher the intake of animal protein and fat, the higher the rate of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.
According to Animal Factories, a leading expose on animal agribusiness, the average American consumes over 840 pounds of animal products per year, or 70 grams of animal protein each day. Combined with non-animal protein, this comes to three times the requirement set out by the conservative World Health Organization, which calls for 33 grams per day. With this level of animal protein and fat intake, it's not surprising that 1 in 3 Americans get cancer and 1 in 4 have a heart attack.
Most are held captive for their entire lives in severely cramped battery cages, crates, or pens, often forced to stand on painful wire or slatted floors that cripple their feet and legs. As a result of these overcrowded, unnatural conditions, compounded by callous and sometimes cruel treatment, the animals' behavioral, social, and psychological needs are denied and insanity and abnormal behaviors are rampant, from stereotypic gnawing movements to cannibalism. Thus, many people choose vegetarianism after learning how animal products are produced. They do not want to be consumers of cruelty.
Moreover, many vegetarians hold that the entire concept of marketing living, feeling individuals is morally wrong. Given that we can live not only well, but more healthfully, on a vegetarian diet, they find they cannot justify taking animals' lives simply because their flesh is pleasing to the palate.
At the slaughterhouse, frenzy and terror await four-legged animals. They are prodded and beaten to move them quickly into the killing area. They are forced to walk single file up a chute to a stunning bin, often watching the killing of those ahead of them amid the smell of blood and the constant agonized cries of those in fear for their lives.
When stunning is employed, usually a captive bolt pistol is used for cattle and electrical stunning is used for pigs. These can be effective devices, but they are not always used. Then the animals are suspended upside down by their hind feet from a conveyor belt, and are stabbed in the throat with a knife. Blood is drained, and what was a breathing, feeling animal becomes a carcass to be processed.
In bird slaughter, chickens, turkeys, and other birds are suspended upside down from a mechanical conveyor by their feet while fully conscious. If stunning is employed they are passed through an electrical stunning device. Then they are passed over a blade that slits their throat.
After blood drains they are immersed in scalding water to loosen their feathers. Theoretically, they are unconscious prior to this procedure. However, plant workers report that many birds are still conscious when scalded.
Additionally, there are exceptions for Jewish and Moslem rituals which require the animals to be fully conscious while slaughtered. While these rules carried humane intentions originally, today they result in the most painful, terrifying type of slaughter, in which conscious animals weighing up to 2,000 pounds are hoisted up by one rear leg, tearing skin, tendons, and other tissue and possibly breaking bones. A more humane "casting pen" alternative is now used for some kosher slaughter, but not all.
Q: Other animals eat each other. Doesn't that mean it's natural for us to do so also?
A: While nonhumans animals are not able to make choices about their diets or act as moral agents, people are. Additionally, only those animals who are carnivores eat other animals. Physiological differences between carnivorous and vegetarian species suggest that people have more in common with vegetarian animals than with carnivores.
For example, carnivores have claws, sharp, elongated teeth for tearing flesh, an intestinal tract only three times body length (to expel decaying flesh rapidly), acid saliva, and no perspiration pores. On the other hand, vegetarian animals, including humans, have no claws or fangs, and do have flat back molars for grinding, stomach acid 20 times weaker than that of carnivores, intestinal tracts 12 times body length, alkaline saliva, and perspiration pores. In fact, human physiology is so unsuited to animal products that numerous health hazards are associated with an animal-based diet. (See discussion on page above.) We bear closest anatomical resemblance to anthropoid apes, who derive most of their food from plants.
Neither are we psychologically outfitted as predators. Most people must have their meat slaughtered by proxy, and would be sickened by the act of slaughtering an animal.
Some scientists believe humans were forced to adopt an omnivorous diet during the Ice Age as a result of survival threats caused by climatic change. In emergency conditions humans and other animals may survive by eating foods that are not "natural" to their diet. However, it is not necessary for most present day Americans to eat animal flesh to survive, and in fact, doing so reduces life expectancy.
According to nutrition specialist Michael Klaper, M.D., the outdated belief that vegetarians need to "combine" protein came from studies done in the 1920's on white rats. The conclusions are now recognized as invalid, because rats have very different protein requirements than humans.
In 1988 and again in 1993 the conservative American Dietetic Association gave a ringing endorsement to vegetarian nutrition in their "Position Paper on Vegetarian Diets." It said a well planned pure vegetarian diet is fully health supporting and attention to protein complementing is unnecessary.
B12 is produced in the body by intestinal flora, but it is not presently clear whether intestinal B12 is absorbed. The requirement for B12 is the lowest for all vitamins, and the body stores it so well that most people are carrying many years' reserve. Nevertheless, until the issue is resolved, it's easy to provide a margin of safety by taking occasional supplements, which are widely available in tablet, sublingual, and nasal forms.
Since plants cannot move away from noxious stimuli, the ability to feel pain, fear, or other feelings would not enhance their survival; thus, there is no evolutionary incentive for them to develop sentience. However, if we grant the benefit of the doubt and assume plants are consciously aware, a vegetarian diet will still result in less taking of sentient life, because fewer plants are consumed by eating them directly than by the grossly inefficient process of cycling them through animals as feed. The conversion ratio for grain to meat is five to twenty pounds of grain for one pound of meat, depending on the type of grain and species of animal. Thus, whether or not plants feel, a vegetarian diet appears to be the more ethical choice.
Q: Do vegetarians eat seafood?
A: Though some people claim to be "pesco-vegetarians," (fish-eating vegetarians), by definition vegetarians do not eat animals, regardless of whether they walk, fly, swim, or crawl. Fish, lobsters, and other aquatic animals killed in cruel ways are among the most misunderstood and mistreated of all animals. The perception that fish do not feel, or do not have well developed nervous systems, is widespread. Given the level of desensitization toward animals who can cry out, it is not surprising that the agony of those who cannot goes unrecognized. In truth, however, fish possess the same basic nervous system and sensory mechanisms that other vertebrates have and are fully feeling beings.
As with other animal foods, there are also reasons of self-interest to not eat aquatic animals. The pesticides and toxins that wash into waterways go into what they eat and drink. Every time one fish eats another, the lead, PCB's, mercury, and other toxins become more concentrated in the surviving fishes' tissue, and the process continues further and further up the food chain. As a result, a study at Wayne State University found children of women who eat fish only 1-2 times per month have a higher incidence of retardation and sluggishness than those of women who eat no fish.
For those who have difficulty breaking the meat habit, meat substitutes (often called "transitional foods") can be used as meat is, though it is not necessary to use them. There are dozens of excellent vegetarian cookbooks that can give novices ideas on meal preparation. For support and help in making the transition, join your local vegetarian society or animal rights group, or start one if one doesn't exist in your community.
Source: Pennington, J., Food Values of Portions Commonly Used, Harper and Row, 14th Ed., New York 1985