Eating Meat is Bad

Do you ever think about what you put into your body? Eating meat is a part of the everyday life of billions of people globally. Day-to-day, thousands of animals are being eliminated for the manufacture of meat food for people. However, studies have shown that meat is not essential for our existence and gives us nothing more than other foods on the market. Eating animal products is unethical, unnatural, and unhealthy. Every year, thousands of guiltless animals are executed for no reason. People think they need meat, because of nutrition. We can still have all these naturally from the earth. Eating meat and having a vegetarian lifestyle can have vast benefits to animals, the environment and to your health. Albert Einstein quoted, “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” A genius like Albert Einstein is expressing that the planet life is deteriorating and giving the answer to solve the matter. Can you just imagine going through the pain that an animal must go through? Eliminating meat from your diet will decrease the risks of cancers, improve the environment and save the lives of many animals.

When eating meat, you put yourself at a higher risk to foodborne illness, heart diseases, strokes, and cancers. A meat-eating diet will increase your cholesterol levels, which can cause plaque development in your arteries. This growth can restrict blood flow to your heart and/or brain that can cause a heart attack and/or stroke. There have been studies that have found an interconnection between a high-meat diet and cancer. When consuming highly-processed meats, you are especially vulnerable to cancer because of the cosmic amount of sodium they contain for preservatives. According by psychologist Dr. Melanin Joy, people are known to emotionally disconnect from the animal flesh on their plate, forgetting it was once a living being. Colleen Doyle, MS, RD, American Cancer Society managing director concluded: “We should be limiting red and processed meat to help reduce colon cancer risk and the risks of other cancers.” Withholding from eating meat can decrease your risks of certain cancers such as diabetes, enhance the environment from water and land consumption, and emancipate the lives of numerous animals from being slaughtered. About 80% of the people who devour animal products since they were children will have health problems when they grow up. This can be cancer, bad cholesterol, obesity, stroke, and high blood pressure. We can also help nature by choosing to become vegan. It required you linchpin on consuming natural food from the earth. This can be vegetables, fruits, grains, and nuts. By eating those mentioned, you can easily store your needed nutrition, such as calcium, protein, and vitamins.

Food is often thought of as a commodity when fundamentally it is our nourishment and foundation of life. In the United States, it appears as if we have a functional food system, but in reality what we have is an unsustainable system of industrialized agriculture perpetuated by a disproportionate allocation of resources. Current consumer behavior within our food system is detrimental to future environmental and human well-being, ultimately exacerbating the timing and magnitude of global climate change. Avoiding meat and dairy is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on the earth. Research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75%. This is equivalent to the US, China, European Union, and Australia combined, and could still feed the world. The analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the 83% vast majority of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows that 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans.

The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact of meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing. Studies database shows that almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It has assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use, water pollution, and air pollution. “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions. “Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems,” he said. “Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this.

Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.” Reducing meat consumption will create tangible benefits almost immediately through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions2 and decreased pressure on land and water use. As of 2016, 10.6 million people in the US, or about 3% of the population, are vegan. The CBA aims to increase the amount of non-meat eaters in the US by 10%, resulting in 13% of the population practicing plant-based diets over a 25-year timeframe. The results from this cost benefit analysis show that 13% of the population in 2040, an estimated 49,048,000 people, will not consume meat and save a total of 9,809,650 pounds of meat over a 25-year period.

This will result in over 16.5 billion gallons of water being saved if 13% of the population did not consume meat. Livestock, especially cattle, produce methane as part of their digestion. This is a process called enteric fermentation. Methane's lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than carbon dioxide, but methane is actually more efficient at trapping radiation than CO2. An increase in the population of people who practice plant-based diets, therefore a reduction in the demand for and production of meat, will in turn reduce the amount of grain crops used for feed, and eventually in combination with a rise in demand for vegetable crops, allow more land to be allocated towards such crops. An increase in plant-based population will also reduce intense water usage for animal feed crop and be allocated more efficiently. An increase in plant-based population will contribute to a necessary reduction of greenhouse emissions specifically methane leading to a crucial impact on the pace of global climate change. To sum it all up, eliminating the consumption of red meat in your everyday eating habits can make a huge impact on water and land consumption.

We, humans, eat about 230m tons of animals a year, twice as much as we did 30 years ago. Most people like to keep the thought in their heads that these animals live on beautiful green farms where the animals are treated great and then have a very peaceful death, and never feel any or little pain. Well, that is not the case, these animals are treated very unfairly. The animals in slaughterhouses are given a massive amount of antibiotics, hormones, and drugs to keep them alive in conditions that are so bad they would otherwise kill them. Also, many people still believe that by not eating meat, you are not getting all the nutrients that you need to stay healthy. It is now known that that is not true. Meat does not provide any nutrients that vegetarians cannot obtain from other sources. In order to live normally, your body needs to be healthy. Would you rather continue eating meat, and live an unhealthy life, or become vegetarian and not worry about all the diseases you could get from your daily meals? If you have a soft spot for animals, I think you might think twice about eating them after you hear how they are treated on large farms.

First of all, farmers cut off baby chickens beaks so that when these baby chickens are placed into their tiny, cell like cages, they won’t peck the other seven or eight chicks that they have to share their cage with. Chickens on large farms don't even have enough room to stretch their wings, and hen's cages are built so that every egg these chickens lay rolls away from them, and onto a conveyor belt to be collected and sold. When the hens cannot produce any more eggs, the farmer first stops feeding them. Farmers have discovered that starving the hens makes the hens produce more eggs for a little while. Then, when the hens are finally run dry, and cannot produce any more eggs, these hens are driven to a slaughterhouse and are killed for meat. On meat farms, chickens are given drugs so that these chickens can grow faster and bigger, until they grow so large that they can barely stand. If we all become vegetarians, farmers won't raise as many animals, because no one will be buying their products, and so many animals won't be tortured like this anymore. All you need to do is stop eating meat and eggs, it shouldn't be a hard thing to do after just hearing how the animals are treated.

The treatment of these animals is inhumane, the way these animals live and the conditions in which these animals live in is a factor in the health effects of the meat and the environmental issues. We can do so much better just by slightly changing the way we eat, and it would bring a huge positive impact on the earth. Peter Singer a bioethics professor says, “You could say that if you kill a cow you're depriving it of the rest of its existence, and which could also have been a happy, good existence, so why deprive it of that just because you want to eat some meat when you've got other healthy, nutritious, delicious things that you could also eat? "The counter-argument is this cow would not have existed if we had not already planned in advance that at some point we would kill it and we would sell the meat, because obviously it costs something to rear a cow, and we can only meet that cost if we are going to kill it. "So in a sense, the cow could thank us for her existence - at least she has some existence rather than none.

“If a cow is killed that will make it possible for another cow to come into existence who will have a good life, and if the first cow were not killed it would not be possible for the other cow to come into existence. "So yes, this cow standing in front of us will lose the rest of her life, but that loss is replaced by bringing the other cow into existence and the other cow will also have that happy life. “In theory - other things being equal - I do buy that argument. I say in theory because I think it's very hard to produce circumstances where that actually occurs and there aren't other undesirable side effects. Given the animals in our food supply are mostly cattle and sheep, and they are major producers of greenhouse gases, I think on balance, it would be better if they didn't exist. "I think we'll come to view [eating meat] in the way we now look back on the Roman games; having crowds of enthusiastic people cheering on the lions as they slaughtered the Christians or gladiators fighting each other to the death. "The last time I intentionally ate meat was 1971. I grew up eating a lot of meat in Australia and I liked it, but I really haven't missed it for a long time.”

Conclusion

In conclusion, meat is not a necessity to the human diet, and we can live better off without it. Not only will your body feel better, you are also improving the environment and saving the many lives of animals. A meat-eaters’ diet is responsible for almost twice the greenhouse gas emissions as vegetarians’ and going vegan could cut your emissions. Meaty diets require more land, water, energy, fertilizer, and pesticides than vegan diets. There is no nutritional benefit from meat that can’t be found in a varied vegan diet; you are much better of getting healthier fats, plant protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals from a range of plant foods. The health benefits of avoiding meat are indisputable which is why, slowly but surely, the world’s most reputable health bodies are beginning to recommend change. The meat industry has been able to influence official dietary guidelines for decades. Just look at how the US Department of Agriculture rejected the advice of their own expert panel by not including considerations of environmental sustainability in the most recent edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Let’s make the change to a better us and a better way of living. All-in-all, substituting meat with more plant-based products to your overall diet will minimize the risks of cancers, enhance the environment, and prolong the lives of many animals.

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