Health
Dr. Neal Bernard calls for the adoption of a healthy vegetarian diet, to drop cholesterol levels, open up clogged coronary arteries, shrink waistlines and drop cancer rates.
Dr. Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (who is best known for his support of low-fat diets in reversing heart disease), is now contending that diet changes could also help reverse prostate cancer. His new study reports that a diet of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and beans, coupled with exercise and meditation, can help slow, stop, or even reverse prostate cancer for men in the early stages of the disease.
"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." This is an oft-quoted edict of the ninth century medical school of Salerno, in their support of vegetarianism. They were the first established medical school in the western world.
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with," and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Economy
It takes 16 lbs of grain and soy fed to beef cattle to get back 1 lb of meat. Other livestock are more efficient with hogs requiring 6 lbs, turkeys 4 lbs, and chickens 3 lbs, while dairy requires 1 lb of grain for every pint of milk produced.
~ Diet for a Small Planet
Livestock consume 97% of America's legumes, 90% of its grain, and 80% of its fish, while supplying only 20% of the nation's food supply.
If a significant number of people gave up eating meat, we could feed more people for a lot less money.
~ Peter Burwash's Vegetarian Primer
Irascible, frugal, clean-living Ben Franklin, the man who gave us "a penny saved is a penny earned," embraced vegetarianism mostly, because as he so eloquently put it, "It saved me money."
Environment
Vast areas of rain forest are being destroyed and laid down to grass in South America, in order to raise beef cattle for the North American steak and hamburger market. As a result, the world is losing rare species at a frightening and accelerating rate. This pressure will only increase as China's population buys into a North American lifestyle with its increasing affluence.
In 1960 the average American ate 190 lbs of meat. Today he eats 300 lbs. Some 45% of arable land is, therefore, used to graze livestock. Only 17% is used for raising crops, and most of those crops are grown to feed livestock.
~ Peter Burwash
Altruism
Why are you so indifferent to the starving people in the Third World, that you selfishly continue to eat more than ten times the grain you need in the form of animal protein?
~ The Vegan Cookbook
Many things made me become a vegetarian, among them the higher food yield as a solution to world hunger.
~ John Denver
Compassion
Most omnivores, if they were forced to spend a single day enduring the conditions of the average factory farm or slaughterhouse, would renounce meat-eating for life.
It is not lack of imagination that prevents them from discovering this, but a deliberate, conscious decision to remain ignorant for fear that knowing the full consequences of their demand for cheap meat, would be too painful to endure.
"If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty."
~ Sir Paul McCartney
Ethics
We often claim to have attained the highest level of consciousness of any living creature on earth. Whether this is true or not, it is certainly true that we have become the guardians of this planet and of all its life forms.
A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.
~ Tolstoy
Spirituality
Orthodox Buddhists and Hindus have always been vegetarian, and often vegan, for their religions are founded on the belief that all life is sacred — not just human life, as in Christianity, but all life.
You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car.
~ Harvey Diamond
When George Bernard Shaw first decided to try vegetarianism sometime around his twenty-fifth birthday, his doctors warned him that the diet would kill him.
Sixty-five years later, he was asked whether he'd ever returned to those same doctors to rub it in a little. He replied, "I would, but they all passed away years ago."
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
