Top Reasons to Try Vegetarian – Honoring Vegetarian Awareness Month

We began this month with something about World Vegetarian Day, and because the response was so strong both here and on social media, here’s a follow-up. As that post mentioned, October is Vegetarian Awareness Month, so it’s appropriate to send a shout-out to all our meat-free friends out there. Vegetarians certainly hear more than enough unsolicited comments and opinions. Yes, we’ve heard concerns about getting enough protein. Oh, that’s a new one, about hating plants (because we eat all of them ha ha).

To quote Bob Dylan, don’t criticize what you can’t understand.

Sometimes we hear vegetarians say something like, “If only someone would try a vegetarian diet, just for a day or two.” Or, a person contemplating a healthier lifestyle might wonder what it could be like to go meat-free for a period of time. Well, why not try it? A day of sampling something new hardly ever hurt anyone. Right?

With that, in celebration of Vegetarian Awareness Month, let’s offer the Top 5 Reasons to Try Vegetarian:

1. You want to get healthy. Simple enough, the trade-off of fat, cancer-causing and often hormone- or pesticide-marred meats, for foods that often offer anti-inflammatory or cholesterol-lowering properties fits this bill. Think about this: vegetarians are about 40 percent less likely to have cancer develop in their bodies compared with those who eat meat. Plus, put simply, eating healthy makes you feel better.
2. You don’t want a heart attack. Did you know that more than three-quarters of Americans suffering from cardiovascular disease see a reverse of their symptoms, if they change to a low-fat vegetarian diet including whole foods?
3. You respect animals.
4. You don’t like milk, or fish. Isn’t it weird that human beings are the only species that consumes the milk of another species? Many people are unaware of the very high cholesterol content in cow milk and the fact that cow’s milk is perfectly designed to nourish a baby calf and turn it into a 400 lb cow. Not to mention what human beings inject into the animal producing the milk (like growth hormones or antibiotics) as well as its links to allergies and asthma. If there is one thing you change about your diet, eliminating dairy could be by far the most beneficial one!
5. You value the environment. Raising animals for human food consumption causes horrendous impacts to the environment, including a good chunk of the Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions, enormous consumption of water to produce beef, runoff of toxins from chicken and dairy factories into lakes and bays, topsoil depletion and more. All just from raising animals for people to eat.

Do you have one to add? We’d love to hear from you!