Why A Vegan Vegetarian Diet?

The word vegetarian derives from the latin word "vegetare" which means "to enliven." Thus contrary to what many think, vegetarian does not simply denote a person who eats vegetables. The Romans used the word "homo vegetus" which means "a lively, vigourous man, sound in body and mind," thus the root of the word leads towards the conclusion that a vegetarian is more than just a vegetable eater, but also someone with increased life force (Carque, 1904). Looking through history, many of our greatest leaders and thinkers taught that being a vegetarian enlivens man and causes balanced vigor and vitality, explaining why this definition shows up in the roots of our language.

~Albert Einstein

"I have from an early age abjured from the use of meat."

~Leonardo da Vinci

"My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension."

~Benjamin Franklin

1. One acre of land raises 40 lbs of flesh, that same acre could produce 400 lbs of grain and seed. Sprouting, one of the major practices of a lifefood lifestyle, allows one to gain approximately seven pounds of nourishment from one pound of seeds (Wigmore 94).
2. 90% of the protein, 99% of the carbohydrate, and 100% of the fiber is lost by cycling grain through livestock, clearly not a sustainable practice.
3. The human population of the U.S. is roughly 300 million, while 1.4 billion humans could be fed from the grain and soy eaten by U.S. livestock.
4. Great civilizations are thought to have demised due to topsoil depletion, and currently the primary cause of depletion is from grain farming for bread grains, rice, and livestock (none of which are part of a lifefood lifestyle.) The U.S. has lost 75% of its topsoil.
5. An acre of U.S. trees disappear every 8 seconds, and each individual who switches to a vegetarian diet spares one acre of trees a year. The driving force behind destruction of rainforest is the American meat habit. 1000 species a year are lost through rainforest destruction.
6. More than half of the U.S. water supply goes to livestock production. The cost of one pound of protein from beefsteak if U.S. taxpayers no longer subsidized the meat industries use of water would be $89!
7. Length of time world's petroleum reserves would last if all human beings ate a meat centered diet: 13 years; versus 260 years if all humans ate a vegetarian diet.
8. The U.S. population produces 12,000 pounds of excrement per second, and U.S. livestock produces 250,000 lbs. of excrement, yet humans have sewage systems, while feedlots for livestock do not. One billion tons of excrement is produced by livestock annually that is not recycled, it is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than domestic sewage, and it typically ends up in our water supply.
9. Leading cause of saturated fat and cholesterol in American diets: meat, dairy products, and eggs. Meat, dairy, and egg industries claim that there is no reason to be concerned about your blood cholesterol as long as it is normal, but 50% of those whose blood cholesterol is "normal" are at risk of dying of a disease from clogged arteries.
10. World populations with high meat intake who do not have correspondingly high rates of colon cancer: none.
11. Egg board's advertising slogan: The incredible edible egg. Increased risk of breast cancer is 3 times higher for women who eat eggs daily compared to those who eat eggs less than once a week. Increased risk of fatal ovarian cancer is also 3 times higher for women who eat eggs 3 or more time a week compared to women who eat eggs less than once a week. Part of female body that produces eggs: Ovaries.
12. The food that males in the U.S. are conditioned to think of as manly : Animal products (mostly meat). But there is a 3.6 times higher increased risk of fatal prostate cancer for men who consume meats, cheese, milk, and eggs daily compared to men who eat these foods sparingly or not at all.
13. The amount of calories as fat in whole milk: 50%. The Dairy Council says: Milk is Natures most perfect food. What they do not say: Milk is Nature's most perfect food for a baby calf, who has four stomachs, will double its weight in 47 days, and is destined to weigh 300 pounds within a year.
14. Chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticide residues in the U.S. diet: supplied by meat: 55%, by dairy products: 23%, by vegetables: 6%, by fruits: 4%, by grains: 1%. Percentage of U.S. mother ?s milk containing significant levels of DDT: 99%. Percentage of U.S. vegetarian mother's milk containing significant levels of DDT: 8%. Sperm count of average American male compared to 35 years ago: down 30%! Principle reason for sterility and sperm count reduction of U.S. males: Chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides (dioxin, DDT, etc.).
15. McDonald's clown, Ronald McDonald, tells children: Hamburgers grow in hamburger patches and love to be eaten. What he does not tell children: Hamburgers are ground up cooked cows who have had their throats slit by machetes or their brains bashed in with sledgehammers. The original actor to play Ronald McDonald, Jeff Juliano, is now a vegetarian. The occupation with the highest turnover rate in the U.S.: Slaughterhouse worker. Cost to render animals unconscious prior to slaughter with captive bolt pistol so that process is humane: $.01. Reason given by meat industry for not utilizing captive bolt pistol: too expensive. Gandhi said, " The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
16. Percentage of total antibiotics used in the U.S. fed routinely to livestock: 55%. Percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin in 1960: 13%, in 1998: 91%.
17. Only man to win Ironman Triathlon more than twice: Vegetarian Dave Scott (6 time winner). World record bench press: Vegetarian Stan Price. World-renowned cyclists trained on vegan raw-foods by French herbalist Maurice Messegue: Fausto Coppi and Luis Ocana. Vegan raw-foodist and American strongman who enjoyed wide popularity in the 1930's, best known for pulling trains with his teeth: Joe "The Atom" Greenstein. For a much, much longer list of famous vegetarian and living food athletes, see Appendix D of Nature's First Law.

Purchase Diet for a New America by John Robbins for the full health, ethical, economical, and environmental arguments against meat consumption.

In terms of health, over 3,000 doctors have requested that the FDA take meat and dairy off of the recommended four food groups for a reason(Romano, 1997). Fortunately the medical profession has at least been able to move towards vegetarianism, even if living food diets are still too much for a majority of the profession to consider.

Need a reason to be Vegan? Watch this:

Meat and the Alkaline diet

Hunter-Gatherers and Ancient Man

The fossils of the earliest hominids (humans) show decreased mass of the jaw and teeth that are evidence of a high quality, plant-based diet (Milton, 1993). In 1985, a distinguished physician and anthropologist wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that "from about 24 to 5 million years ago fruits appear to have been the main dietary constituent for hominids." Man's closest biological relatives in the ape(primate) family are also primarily fruitarian. Besides man, the Hominide family includes gorillas, chimps, and orangutans, all 90-100% vegetarian. Gorillas are 100% vegetarian and chimps and orangutans generally eat 90% fruit, 5% leaves, 4% bark and stems, and 1% insects/flesh. Some chimps have been observed to never hunt at all. Those that do hunt do so in a seemingly ritualistic manner, and it is too infrequent to be for any significant nutritional reasons (Busse/Hamilton, 1978) (Goodall, 1999) (Barkas, 1975).

While we may like to define ourselves or chimpanzees as being omnivores, the reality is both humans and chimps are 97% frugivores (read about this here) according to our anatomy and physiology that dictates what our bodies are best designed to digest, which is not meat and grains. In practice, we act like raccoons (omnivores) out of ignorance, and eat just about anything, but this does not mean that we are physiologically a omnivore nor that are bodies function properly when we act as one. The right vegetarian diet proves to be much more supportive to the biology and physiology of the human body, however, because meat is such an addictive substance, and because the meat industry and slaughterhouses hide away the nasty facts about killing animals for sustenance, many will continue to try to ignore, distort, or simply not care to see the facts.

Video of Famous Vegans and Vegetarians