Vegetarianism :: Healthy Lifestyle Essay

VegetarianismVegetarianism is the limitation of ones food to only vegetables. Vegetarianism has been around for centuries, but recently we have seen the kick of a more militant vegetarianism that is inspired by the animal rights movement. Today, vegetarian activists argon throwing pies at Ronald McDonald and the Pork Queen, scrawling substance is murder in prominent locations, committing terrorist acts of arson, and waging media campaigns equating meat consumption with cannibalism. Vegetarians ar, on the average, far healthier than those who consume the ordinary occidental diet, and enjoy a lower incidence of many chronic diseases. However, it has not been proven that one must eliminate meat from ones diet in order to be healthy. It has been aptly demonstrated that the typical Western diet contains too much fat. Eliminating meat from the diet is one bureau to reduce fat, but it is not the only way. Vegetarian diets have also been shown to sum up the risk for nutrient def iciencies. Children are particularly vulnerable and can jumper cable to growth problems. Vegetarian children often fail to grow as well as their omnivorous counterparts despite protein intakes. Ecological arguments against omnivorous and carnivorous consume are little more than an attempt by those from the less popular animal rights movement to ride the coattails of the more popular environmental movement. In about cases, warnings of impending environmental cataclysm are used to advance an good agenda. However, arguments to the effect that eating meat is destroying the planet overlook that the planet has not yet been destroyed despite millions of years of omnivorous and carnivorous eating by millions of individuals from a multitude of species. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that some nada will be inevitably lost as one moves up the food web. Therefore, arguments about how it takes X pounds of plant protein to generate Y pounds of meat have a sound theoretical basis. However, these arguments are often overstated. These arguments wrongly assume that pork chops and steak are the only products of animal agriculture. They falsely usurp that a pound of animal foodstuffs is nutritionally and energetically equivalent to a pound of plant foodstuffs. These arguments also ignore the energy content and fortune cost of replacing animal by-products, which is considerable. Even the animals excrement is a worthful resource. Certain animal products, such as fetal calf serum, collagen and laminin are crucial for medical research using cell cultures, and have no available alternatives.