What's Good To Eat Finalized

The obesity rate in America has risen for the past few years. The leading cause of this is because most do not watch they eat. People don’t recognize what foods are necessarily healthy and what type of foods are unhealthy. Also, when people eat their foods, they don’t really pay attention to the taste of it or how it actually got to the table. It’s almost like the video we watched in our class “Our Daily Bread” when the woman who was cutting up the pig had no relationship with it. She was just doing her job, chewing gum and not feeling any disgust while cutting up the different organs of the pig.
I was always told that vegetables are very healthy for you, in which everybody should have at least 2 and a half servings of it every day. I was told that people should cut down more on eating meat to eating none at all and more on vegetables. A person who practices vegans abstains from the consumption or use of meat, fish, daily products, etc. These all come from a variety of different animals. “People become vegans for a variety of reasons, including ethical concerns for animal rights or the environment, as well as more personal reasons such as perceived health benefits and spiritual or religious concerns”( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan). I believe that a person who undergoes the Vegan diet is in the border line of being healthy and not healthy. According to Bruce Friedrich, he says, “It also occurred to me that animals are made of the same stuff as humans—flesh and blood and that they suffer just as we do. I grew up in Minnesota and Oklahoma, and it always saddened me to see trucks loaded with turkeys, chickens, pigs, or cows driving through the bitter Minnesota winter or the sweltering, arid Oklahoma summer, taking the animals, through all weather extremes, to what I knew would be a gruesome death.” (http://www.goveg.com/veganism.asp). Many reasons why people become vegans are because they think that it is the only way to protect humans and the animals in this environment and/or for religious purposes. Many believe that sticking to vegetables is healthy because of the rich contents it has to offer for the body. They believe that meat is the ones that are making people sick. Bruce Friedrich supports this by saying, “They have absolutely no fiber or complex carbohydrates in them, and they are packed with saturated fat and cholesterol. In the short term, eating meat, dairy products, and eggs is likely to make a person fat and lethargic.” (http://www.goveg.com/veganism_health.asp). The accessibility for purchasing vegetables is very convenient and is everywhere, which makes it so easy to get. The majority of the vegetables that can be found are also very cheap. This essay will help to argue why the vegan diet is a good way to eat.
The vegan diet can be a very healthy diet in many ways. Vegans believe that eating vegetables is healthier than consuming meat which comes from different animals that are given different antibiotics and growth hormones. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan, it states that “"well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence." This proves that going on a vegan diet is very healthy for people who have health problems, children who are still growing and also, for pregnant ladies. People who undergo the vegan diet have a rare chance of getting heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, etc. A lot of these health problems are due to a person’s diet. The leading cause of these health problems comes from the consumption of meat. Eating a lot of meat causes a persons arteries to clog. A person who abides by the vegan diet is known to have a mass decrease in their cholesterol compared to a meat- eater. Also, many vegetarians are most likely to be “one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. You can be a fat vegan, of course, and you can be a skinny meat-eater. But vegans are, on average, 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters” according to http://www.goveg.com/veganism_health.asp.
A person who is under the vegan diet has many different ways in purchasing their required foods. It’s accessible and can be very cheap. Vegetarian food is a bit new to the American lifestyle. It has not been around for such a long period of time. According to Bruce Friedrich, he explains how when he became a vegetarian, some foods didn’t taste so great. He explains how today, Silk-brand soy milk is in every grocery store in the country. (http://www.goveg.com/veganism_conclusion.asp). There are a lot of local supermarkets that sells organic products for a reasonable price also. Throughout the food course, when you see the word organic in a local Whole Foods Market, it isn’t what it seems to be. When vegans think about their moral part of being a vegan, why do they think that organic food is such a great thing? How do these organic foods really get to the supermarket? Easy to answer question. From a truck that delivers it from a place outside of New York City. This means there is some industrial side. Industrial, as in what Americans are living off of. The variety of foods that are bought in a supermarket is not locally grown. It also deals with fossil fuels, which is definetly not a good thing. A lot of the vegetarian food can come up to be a lot cheaper than buying meat all the time. Also, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan, it states that “a person switching from the typical American diet to a vegan diet would, on average, reduce CO2 production significantly more than switching to a hybrid vehicle. They go on to recommend a vegan diet for this reason, as well as the potentially adverse health effects of dietary animal fats and proteins.” This proves how going on a vegan diet is very helpful to our environment, which can also be a very helpful way to have mass production of more vegetables.
Vegans are generally against the violence and cruelty of animals. The meat that a lot of people consume comes from these animals that are being slaughtered. When it comes to the ethical reasons, vegans have a real big say. Vegans believe “that animals have the ability to feel pleasure so killing them is wrong, because it destroys any hope of future pleasure. He claims that it is therefore unethical to treat them as property or a means to an end.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan). This quote is significant because it is saying that animals are just like humans. They all have the right to live and be treated as if they are human, because we do not really differ from them. It is wrong to kill animals because they are just like one of us. Vegans argue that animals do not deserve to be slaughtered. They have emotions just like humans and are made up of flesh and blood. Therefore, they don’t deserve to be treated the way they do to satisfy a human. Vegans also think about the availability of water. “According to the National Audubon Society, raising animals for food requires about as much water as all other water uses combined, even as many areas are experiencing drought conditions. It requires about 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day. It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat-eater. Of course, if you have to feed animals, you have to irrigate the crops that you’re feeding them. You have to give them water. The systems that keep animals today use water to hose down both the factory farm and the slaughterhouse. It’s a water-intensive operation,” according to http://www.goveg.com/veganism_environment.asp. Those who work in the factories where animals are being slaughtered has to be one of the most dirty and most cruel jobs ever. They watch the animals have every part of their body ripped apart while they are doing their job. To get a clear vision of what the working issues are like, http://www.goveg.com/veganism_welfare.asp clearly states, “their throats are slit, their limbs hacked off, and their skin torn from their bodies, while they are still conscious. Pigs routinely go into the scalding hot water for hair removal still conscious. Chickens are scalded alive in the feather removal tank.” Any vegan would say that people who eat meat is un-ethical because they don’t think of the procedure it takes to have the meat end up in their local supermarket. They don’t realize the sufferings they go through.
After researching and comprehending the vegan diet, I agree with most of their concepts they follow. I agree that eating a lot of meat will lead to a lot of health problems. And I also agree on their position on the slaughter of these animals. For the most part, I believe that being on the vegan diet is healthy. I still believe that people should still eat meat, but it should be organic. Because if you were to be in a very strict vegan diet, that wouldn’t be considered as being “healthy” because you still are missing out on a lot of nutrients that are needed in the body which comes from animals. You could also take it from vitamins, but I don’t think that would be such a great source of getting the nutrient in your system. Animals are treated very differently when they are sold as organic. Meat carries a variety of different nutritional needs in a human. The sources that I addressed were very accurate and reliable. I can say this because they referenced a lot of surveys and actual experiences. It is important to know what’s good for people to eat because diet is a major cause of the high death rate around the world. A person’s health mainly depends on what they are consuming. Therefore, food plays a very important role in the body.