Vegetarianism

The word „vegetarian” was coined in about 1840 to mean people, who lived without killing for food,either for moral and health reasons, or both. But the practice is much older than. The priests of ancient Egypt were forbidden flesh-foods. Many Eastern religions have always recognized the grat importance of all life and the need to live without causing suffering. Modern yoga shares this belief too – yogis say that a truly spiritual life cannot be lived on flesh-foods

Human’s body is more like those of frugivorous mammals than like those of carnivous and even omnivorous animals. Why? For milions of years man must have lived on fruits, nuts, grains and leaves and so developed that kind of digestive system. Perhaps the more we get away from this diet towards meat-eating., the less likely we are to be healthy. But if it is so natural for man to have na omnivorous diet, why do we eat meat at all? One theory is that man may have started eating the flesh of animals during the Ice Ages, when the most of vegetation was destroyed. Today the Eskimos still live almost entirely on flesh – they have no alternative.

Vegetarians claim that the basic food elements which we need come from earth, air and water through vegetation. Therefore they argue that by eating meat we are getting these foods second-hand also means getting chemicals and hormones used in farming and feeding animals. Meat is generally coined to be a “first class” protein, but in fact it contains more water than protein and is very pour source of all the other food elements – minerals, vitamins and carbohydrates.

Have you ever though about how much land is requied to produce meat? When you see a few cows in a field, remember that the field is only a small proportion of what what is requied to support the animal. They will quickly eat the grass in the field and will regulary need to be moved to other fields for further supply of food. In addition to all this grass they will require a lot of other plant food in order to grow into fat, heathy, meat-producing animals. Like us, they need protein for growth – in fact an average of 90% of the protein in the original plant food is used by them. This leaves only 10% of it for those who eat animals’ flesh. So, when we feed aluable plant food to animals it is like throwing 90% of it away.

There is a world food shortage and milions of people are literatelly starving, yet the rich countries continue to live on largely meat-based diet, breeding animals which produce only one-tenth of what they consume. The crops that are fed to them could be used for direct human consumption and multiple many times the food resources avaible to the world.