9 reasons to stop eating meat

9 Reasons to STOP EATING MEAT

• Lower risk of cancer. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has reported that vegetarians are less likely to get cancer by 25 to 50 percent

• Lower risk of heart disease. Researchers Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn have a program that includes a vegetarian diet and is currently one of the few programs that has been proven to reverse heart disease. A vegetarian diet reduces cholesterol. 

• Lower risk of osteoporosis. Studies have shown that too much protein in our diet causes loss of bone calcium. Meat eaters generally get far more protein than they need or can use.

• Lower risk of kidney and gallstones. The calcium leached from the bones by the body’s efforts to neutralize the acids produce by too much protein intake can end up forming kidney stones and gall stones.

• Factory farmed animals carry disease. According to the FDA poultry is the number one source of food-borne illness. Despite the heavy use of pesticides and antibiotics, up to 60% percent of chickens sold at the supermarket are infected with live salmonella bacteria. Approximately 30% of all pork products are contaminated with toxoplasmosis. We are increasingly at risk from highly contagious diseases like Mad Cow Disease and Foot and Mouth disease in sheep and cattle.

• Factory-farmed animals contain toxic chemicals. Meat contains accumulations of pesticides and other chemicals up to 14 times more concentrated than those in plant foods. Half of all antibiotics used in the U.S. are used in farm animals and 90% of those are not used to treat infections but are instead used as growth promoters.

• Animals on factory farms are over-crowded. They spend their brief lives in crowded and ammonia-filled conditions, many of them so cramped that they can't even turn around or spread a wing.

• Animals on factory farms are tortured. Within days of birth, for example, chickens have their beaks seared off with a hot blade. Animals are hung upside down and their throats are sliced open, often while they're fully conscious.

• Animals on factory farms are treated like machines. They are pumped up with drugs, fed their own waste and forced to grow or produce as fast as possible. They are subjected to 24-hour artificial lighting while being crammed into tiny cages one on top of the other to make it easier to harvest.

EATING MEAT IS BAD FOR YOU
Trying considering this.

There is no longer any doubt about the fact that eating meat is bad for your health.

Avoiding meat is one of the best and simplest ways to cut down your fat consumption.

Add to those hazards the fact that if you eat meat you may be consuming hormones, drugs and other chemicals that have been fed to the animals before they were killed and you can see the extent of the danger. No one knows precisely what effect eating the hormones in meat is likely to have on your health. But the risk is there and I think it's a big one. Some farmers use tranquillisers to keep animals calm. Others routinely use antibiotics so that their animals do not develop infections. When you eat meat you are, inevitably, eating those drugs. In America, over half of all antibiotics are fed to animals and I don't think it is any coincidence that the percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin went up from 13% in 1960 to 91% in 1988.

There are, of course, all sorts of old-fashioned myths about eating meat.

It used to be claimed that people who didn't eat meat would be short of protein.
But that is now known to be absolute nonsense.
And it is equally untrue that if you don't eat meat your diet will be deficient in essential vitamins or minerals.

Meat contains absolutely nothing - no protein, vitamins or minerals - that your body cannot obtain perfectly happily from a vegetarian diet.

Every minute of every working day thousands of animals are killed in slaughterhouses. Many animals are bled to death. Pain and misery are commonplace - for animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do.

GILA BETUL.
I'm proud to be a vegetarian :)