Why Being a Vegetarian?


"Animals are my friends-and I don't eat my friends." (George Bernard Shaw)

Do you know these facts? Vegetarian foods are a major source of nutrition for most people in the world. Vegetarians have lower rates of heart disease and some forms of cancer than non-vegetarians. Vegetarian diets can be simple and easy to prepare.Broadly defined,
a vegetarian is a person who does not eat meat, poultry, and fish. Vegetarians eat mainly fruit, vegetables, legumes, grains, seeds, and nuts. Many vegetarians eat eggs and/or dairy products but avoid hidden animal products such as beef and chicken stocks, lard, and gelatin. (http://www.famousveggie.com/quotes.cfm)
People are vegetarians for many reasons, including concern for personal health and the environment, economic and world hunger concerns, compassion for animals, belief in nonviolence, food preferences, or spiritual reasons. People may become vegetarians for one reason, and then later on adopt some of the other reasons as well. Most of the people want to improve their health and loose weights. Experiments have shown that vegetarians are at lower risk for developing: heart disease, colorectal, ovarian, and breast cancers, diabetes, obesity and hypertension (high blood pressure). This is because a healthy vegetarian diet is typically low in fat and high in fiber. However, even a vegetarian diet can be high in fat if it includes excessive amounts of fatty snack foods, fried foods, whole milk dairy products, and eggs. Therefore, a vegetarian diet, like any healthy diet, must be well planned in order to help prevent and treat certain diseases.

Most of the vegetarians give up meat and fish because they do not morally approve of killing animals or because they object to the ways in which animals are kept, treated and killed for food. They think that eating meat is against the universal principle of not wanting to be killed. With the growing awareness of the importance of healthy food, many people are also becoming vegetarian because it matches the kind of low fat, high fiber diet recommended by dieticians and doctors. Concern about the environment is another factor as people become more aware of the effect raising animals for their meat is having on the environment. Or you may be concerned about wasting world food resources by using land to raise animals for meat instead of growing crops that can feed more people directly. (Some of the famous vegetarians are Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Socrates, Plato, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain and Sadegh Hedayat.)
Today, modern society has emphasized on well balanced diet, exercise and healthy lifestyle habits. And because vegetarian diet is an effective way to ensure healthy living, many individuals choose this pattern. In fact, eating vegetables and fruits
are physically and ethically right. Human have been created biologically to eat vegetables and fruits.