Vegetarianism :: Healthy Lifestyle Essay

VegetarianismVegetarianism is the limitation of ones diet to only vegetables. Vegetarianism has been around for centuries, but recently we have seen the eruption of a more militant vegetarianism that is stir by the animal rights movement. Today, vegetarian activists are throwing pies at Ronald McDonald and the Pork Queen, scrawling ticker is murder in prominent locations, committing terrorist acts of arson, and waging media campaigns equating meat consumption with cannibalism. Vegetarians are, on the average, far better than those who consume the typical Western diet, and enjoy a lower incidence of many chronic diseases. However, it has not been proven that one must eliminate meat from ones diet in order to be healthy. It has been aptly demonstrated that the typical Western diet contains too much fat. Eliminating meat from the diet is one substance to reduce fat, but it is not the only way. Vegetarian diets have also been shown to increase the risk for nutrient deficiencies. Chi ldren are particularly vulnerable and can lead to harvest problems. Vegetarian children oftentimes fail to grow as well as their omnivorous counterparts despite protein intakes. Ecological arguments against omnivorous and carnivorous eating are little more than an attempt by those from the less popular animal rights movement to ride the coattails of the more popular environmental movement. In some cases, warnings of impending environmental catastrophe are used to advance an ethical agenda. However, arguments to the effect that eating meat is destroying the planet overlook that the planet has not yet been destroyed despite millions of long time of omnivorous and carnivorous eating by millions of individuals from a multitude of species. The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that some energy will be inevitably lost as one moves up the food web. Therefore, arguments about how it takes X pounds of plant protein to generate Y pounds of meat have a sound theoretical basis. However, these arguments are often overstated. These arguments falsely assume that pork chops and steak are the only products of animal agriculture. They falsely presume that a pound of animal foodstuffs is nutritionally and energetically equivalent to a pound of plant foodstuffs. These arguments also ignore the energy content and opportunity cost of replacing animal by-products, which is considerable. Even the animals excrement is a valuable resource. legitimate animal products, such as fetal calf serum, collagen and laminin are crucial for medical research using cell cultures, and have no available alternatives.