Vegetarianism :: Healthy Lifestyle Essay

VegetarianismVegetarianism is the limitation of ones diet to unless vegetables. Vegetarianism has been around for centuries, except recently we have seen the eruption of a more(prenominal) militant vegetarianism that is inspired by the wolf rights movement. Today, vegetarian activists are throwing pies at Ronald McDonald and the porc Queen, scrawling meat is murder in prominent locations, committing terrorist acts of arson, and waging media campaigns equating meat exercise with cannibalism. Vegetarians are, on the average, far healthier than those who consume the typical Western diet, and savour a lower incidence of many chronic diseases. However, it has not been proven that one must eliminate meat from ones diet in swan to be healthy. It has been aptly demonstrated that the typical Western diet contains alike much fat. Eliminating meat from the diet is one way to reduce fat, but it is not the only way. Vegetarian diets have also been shown to increase the risk for solid fo od deficiencies. Children are particularly vulnerable and can lead to growth problems. Vegetarian children often fail to grow as well as their omnivorous counterparts despite protein intakes. Ecological arguments against omnivorous and carnivorous take in are little more than an attempt by those from the less popular animal rights movement to mobilise the coattails of the more popular environmental movement. In some cases, warnings of impending environmental cataclysm 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 ruined despite millions of years 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 close to how it takes X tucker outs of bring protein to generate Y pounds of meat have a sound theore tical basis. However, these arguments are often overstated. These arguments falsely assume that porc 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 regenerate animal by-products, which is considerable. Even the animals excrement is a valuable resource. Certain animal products, such as fetal calf serum, collagen and laminin are crucial for medical examination research using cell cultures, and have no available alternatives.