Veganism: Reasons to Make the Choice To Be A Vegan

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The Vegan Choice

Being vegan means an active choice for health reasons, a choice for environmental reasons, and a preference for animal rights.

Vegans resolve not to use and consume animal products for food, clothing, or any other purpose.

Both a philosophy and a way of life, the vegan movement was founded in England in the 1940s by Donald Watson, Elsie Shrigley, and others who believed that it was wrong to use and kill animals for human purposes, and that people of conscience were therefore morally obliged not to take part in harming animals.

What Does it Mean to Be Vegan?

Being vegan means that you eliminate all animal products from your diet, strive to make your environment safer, and focus on the overall health benefits. It’s not just a dietary choice; it’s also a lifestyle choice.

If you’re truly vegan, you don’t own anything that’s made of animal, such as wool, leather, silk, fur, down, and other animal-made products. For instance, approximately 3,000 silkworms die to make every pound of silk.

You might be surprised by some of the things that are taboo in a vegan diet. For example, honey, which seems benign, requires the manipulation and exploitation of the insects’ desire to live and protect their hive, so honey is out.

It doesn’t take much discipline to maintain a vegan diet if you are aware of what you are eating. It must have been hard 20 (or even 10) years ago to try and live a vegan lifestyle, but today every humane convenience is now available.

A vegan diet can be full of a wide variety of delicious foods, plus you’ll save a lot of animals from the misery of factory farms.

Animal Rights Reasons

If you see videos of or read about factory farming, you will most certainly be motivated to explore being vegan. This is not necessarily because of ethical or environmental concerns, but is about the facts of severe animal conditions. You might find that you are convincingly converted to veganism by watching the horrid information and images of factory-farmed cows and other animals.

The factory farming industry strives to maximize output while minimizing costs—always at the animals’ expense. The giant corporations that run most factory farms have found that they can make more money by cramming animals into tiny spaces, even though many of the animals get sick and some die.

Environmental Reasons

There are tremendous benefits of a vegan diet to helping end world hunger. Huge amounts of grain, soybeans, and corn feed animals, instead of feeding starving humans. If we stopped intensively breeding farmed animals and grew crops to feed humans instead, we could easily feed every human on the planet with healthy and affordable foods.

The production of wool, fur, and leather contributes to global warming, land devastation, pollution, and water contamination. Manure generated by cattle, sheep, and other animals raised for wool, fur, and leather has contributed to the increase in atmospheric “greenhouse” gasses over the last 250 years.

Health Reasons

What motivates some people to try veganism isn’t animal rights or even environmental issues — it is the possibility of enjoying more energy and vitality, weight loss, an improvement of mental clarity, and increased overall heath.

Healthy vegan diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including our country’s three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes.

Vegan foods provide us with all the nutrients that we need, minus the saturated fat, cholesterol, and contaminants that are found in meat, eggs, and dairy products. Plant-based diets help protect us from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, strokes, and several types of cancer. Vegans also tend to have stronger immune systems and, on average, live 10 years longer than meat-eaters do.

According to the charter of the Vegan Society, “Veganism remembers man’s responsibility to the earth and its resources and seeks to bring about a healthy soil and plant kingdom and a proper use of the materials of the earth.”

Resources

Going Vegan – How to make the move to a vegan diet

Reasons to Become Vegan – Why veganism is a good choice

Veganmeans.com: What it Means to Be Vegan – What you need to know about becoming vegan

Resource by L.Brown

Leslie Brown is a writer and editor with over 20 years of experience in book publishing, information technology, and web content. She has edited books of fiction and non-fiction and is currently providing web content for two web sites. Leslie has a B.A. in Creative Writing, and she has also done some graduate work in technical documentation. She lives near Seattle, Washington, across from a lake, where she often plays in the water with her rescued golden retriever.

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