Veganism in General
First of all in writing about the reasons for being vegan, I need to be clear that veganism, is an ethical decision and NOT a diet. If you want to talk about a diet that doesn’t include animals or animal products – that’s Plant Based (often whole-food plant based or WFPB). So the reasons for being vegan stem in part from the realization that we as conscious beings have no right to abuse or exploit other sentient beings. We also have no right to deprive other sentient beings of their lives. Once you have come to that realization, it should lead to the decision that we shouldn’t eat meat or dairy. This is certainly true if you have integrity and an appreciation of the true facts in regard to meat & dairy production.
Having made that decision, you then need of course to consider what you are going to eat instead of meat & dairy. It is then that you begin to realise that much of what you have been told about nutrition is untrue and that reasons for being vegan are quite complex. Meat is linked to cancer, and processed meat is a recognised carcinogen by the World Health Organisation. Milk is the infant food of another species – why are we told it is good for us as adults & children? Generally this is all brought about by societal traditions and customs. Latterly it is also by the extensive marketing carried out by various commercial entities and governmental operations. Often governmental departments are influenced by lobbying from animal agriculture lobby groups to the animal’s, the planet’s and our detriment. Animal agriculture lobbyists are of course only concerned with carrying out their client’s wishes. Animal agriculture businesses are just concerned with making money – not your benefit or the animals benefit.
A recent case in point is the attempt within the EU to ban the use of meat and dairy related names for replacement vegan products. This action shows that it’s all about money and not about ethics or health. If it was, then there is no way that those names would be banned from being used. That just makes a transition to a vegan lifestyle or plant based diet more difficult and it’s anti-health and anti-ethics. I’m now going to list and explain a number of the most cogent reasons for being vegan/whole food plant based. I say vegan/plant based because veganism is not a diet – it’s an ethical stance. However in transitioning to a vegan diet there are a large number of other potential benefits to human health and the overall health of the planet as well as benefitting the animals by ending their expoitation. I will discuss and expand on that under the headings below.
Please note, that the below topics will be expanded upon and other reasons may be added over time, as this is a “work in progress”……
The health argument:- There are numerous studies that attribute longer lifespan to vegans and this is another one of the reasons for being vegan. One recent study came to the conclusion that vegans lived 15 years (on average) longer than carnivores on an average diet wester diet. This could of course be for a number of reasons. Better lifestyle overall, more fiber due to the amount of vegetables consumed, more excercise, etc. However, since meat consumption itself is linked to higher levels of heart disease, and other degenerative diseases, and bacon and other processed meats are listed as class 1 carcinogens on the WHO website, it would seem more likely that the consumption of meat itself is responsible, rather than the increase in vegetable consumption. For the moment, it’s a fact that in large epidemiological studies, vegans outlive their carnivorous counterparts by 15 years on average. The exact reasons may be harder to pin down. Often vegan recipes contain white rice, white bread, white pasta and white cous-cous. Whilst these items are of course vegan, it’s a shame that more vegans, don’t realize that eating wholefoods is a common sense way of ensuring their optimal health. This site only promotes whole grains except where it’s essential for the recipe to function.
The antibiotic argument:- In factory farming animals are packed together in unhygienic and cramped conditions a powerful one of the reasons for being vegan. This is of course cruel and unnatural because the animals are used to grazing and roaming for their food and this restriction causes them suffering – both mental and emotional. This also way of exploiting animals results in increased levels of disease. To combat this, factory farm owners or operators include antibiotics in the animal’s feedstock as a matter of course. It is in effect a prophylactic. However this has negative effects on the environment, because it causes antibiotic resistant bacteria to become prevalent due to natural selection. Then due to jumping genes or horizontal gene transfer and also environmental escape or migration of the bacteria further down the food chain, these then become problematic for humans. One of the main consequences of this abuse of the use of antibiotics in factory farms is that antibiotic resistant bacteria have become endemic in the human population. This can only get worse, and many pathogenic bacteria are now untreatable. Of course this was flagged up over 50 years ago as a problem in the making, but nothing was been done to curb it, and the problem has only become worse, not better. Going vegan of course resolves this issue completely.
The global warming argument:- Between 75% & 85% of the meat consumed in the UK is produced in factory farms. Yes non-vegans point to the animals you can see in the fields and say “what factory farms”, but that’s just 25 to 15% of the animal agriculture – the rest all goes on inside vast sheds dotted around the countryside. Globally it’s around the same figure. This is because in the USA it’s much higher than the UK and in the other parts of the world it’s lower. Overall it averages out to around 75%. These animals are fed a largely grain and bean based diet to enable them to put on weight quickly. This is not their natural food, and this causes them to emit more methane than they would if just eating grass. Methane is approximately 30 times more potent as a global warming gas than CO2. True it persists for less time – around 12 years, but it is a major component in the global warming mix and is converted to CO2 anyway. The issue doesn’t end there though. Beef requires 25 kg of feedstock to produce 1kg of meat. That 25kg of feedstock needs to be grown somewhere. Somewhere trees could be grown. With pigs it’s around 16kg of feedstock per 1kg of meat, but overall the figure works out to around 16kg when you include chickens which require much less feedstock. So if humans consumed the foodstuffs – grains and beans – that animals are consuming directly, we would need around 1/16 of those grains and beans to replace the meat. Generally carnivorous humans consume far more protein than they require, (0.75g per kg of body weight is the reccommendation) and is around 45g per day for a female and 55g per day for a male. But most carnivorous humans eat twice the protein they need, hence you could replace the 1kg of meat with a 1 kg mixture of beans & grains and be absolutely fine. This means that all the land used to grow the other 15kg of food is not needed and could be returned to natural forest. Of course the land that is currently required to grow the other crops that all humans eat directly – grains for bread, green vegetables and other types of vegetables and nuts etc that omnivores and vegans eat would still be needed. It’s difficult to make a simplistic calculation as to how much land would be released without doing a detailed analysis of how much land is actually needed using reliable source data, but estimates are around 2/3 of currently used agricultural land (pasture and crop growing) could be released back to forest. This vast area of land would be able to soak up huge amounts of CO2 and a recent study calculated that ending all animal agriculture and returning the land to forest would reduce CO2 and methane emissions by a staggering 87%. Although arguments rage about the actual figures – it’s clear that meat consumption is driving deforestation, and that factory farming is using vast tracts of land that could be re-wilded – IF we all went opted for a vegan/plant based lifestyle.
The food shortage argunment:- Most people will not be aware that in the UK, aproximately 75 to 85% of meat for human consumption is produced in factory farms. This leads into another one of the reasons for being vegan. Factory farms work by concentrating animals in usually very cramped conditions and feeding them a concentrated feedstock consisting of grains, beans and other vegetable matter. They used to be fed the ground up remains of other ruminants in the food chain, but this practice was discontinued after the outbreaks of “mad cow disease”. If you look at the “our world in data” meat section, you will see that globally the number is around 70%. You will also see that on average, for every 1kg of meat produced in factory farms, 16kg of feedstock is fed to the animals to produce it. A large proprtion of that feedstock could be fed directly to humans. However the consequences of this go much further than that. To grow that 16kg of feedstock per kg of meat, requires vast areas of land, and also requires the use of fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides to boost yield levels. This has disastrous consequences for biodiversity, ocean algal blooms & eutrification of the ocean, polution of waterways and underground aquifers, and also leads to the clearing of virgin forest areas – particularly in the Amazon basin. However an argument that is often not advanced, but which is true none-the-less, is that using all these feedstocks which contain primary foodstuffs like wheat, maize, soya, and other beans of course sucks in a lot of the world’s food production and therefore raises prices globally, but also crucially in third world countries, and undoubtedly causes food shortages there. Rich people who own the land are going to sell their produce to the highest bidder after all, and that bidder will almost certainly be a major western food importer as opposed to locally impoverished people. People often cite the use of grass fed cattle to counter this argument – but that is simply non-sustainable – see this video here, which concludes that we would need 3 earths! In addition, I include here an interesting (and shocking) web page from our world in data, showing how much of the worlds food supply some countries are actually consuming by consuming meat fed on plant feedstocks that could be eaten directly by humans instead of by factory farmed animals. Whilst the interactive map, doesn’t expliitly state that fact, it is clear from the data, and the assumptions that must be the case. https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
The zoonotic disease argument: Most animals in the UK and rest of the world are raised in factory farms. Given the recent “pandemic” this is also one of the many powerful reasons for being vegan. The overal percentage of meat from factory farms, is around 75%. These animals are kept in very cramped conditions – ideal places for bacteria and viruses to multimply and acquire new and novel characteristics. Also, because humans pass amongst these animal populations frequently in order to operate the facilities – generally not wearing externally sourced breathing aparatus – the opportunity for crossover or “zoonotic transfer” is continuously present. When a virus is present that is capable of jumping to humans it has the perfect opportunity to do so. This was the case with several of the SARS and Avian Flu outbreaks. Eventually one will come along that is extremely problematic for the entire human race. Allegedly – although in this particular instance I do not accept this to be the case – the Covid 19 pandemic is blamed on a chance zoonotic transfer – in a wet market. However it should be clear that continuing to operate factory farming methods is risking the zoonotic transfer of diseases of pandemic potential. Additionally although this argument is covered elsewhere to some extent under the antibiotic section, bacteria that can infect humans are also constantly evolving under the unnatural conditions pertaining in factory farms. This is one of the reasons that antibiotics are routinely deployed in factory farming or CAFOs – by adding them to the feed as a prophylactic. This also facilitates the emergence of problematic and antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Given that meat for human consumption is produced in these facilities and then transferred to humans for consumption, the likelihood of trasference due to improper cooking methods is extremely high.
the biodiversity argument
the human microbiome argument
the sea ecosystem destruction argument
The stand in their shoes argument (or what if superior aliens came)
The full animal cruelty argument
