There are many reasons people choose to become vegetarian. Many are brought up that way, while others choose to become vegetarian for health reasons, or for love of animals, or maybe religious reasons or out of concern for the planet. Others may choose to lose weight or do their part towards reducing hunger and famine worldwide.
Whatever the reasons there is no doubt that as well as being very healthy for you, a vegetarian diet is also highly environmentally positive. For example, the average U.S. citizen consumes about 260lbs of meat each year. Growing the crops necessary to feed the animals requires almost half the United States' water supply and 80% of it's agricultural land. What's more, these animals consume 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop and 70% of the grain crop.
Around the world the average person requires 160 acres of land to keep fed, mostly due to meat farming. With 77 million new people on the planet each year, even with more modern farming techniques, it seems likely that vegetarianism will become more a diet of necessity rather than of choice in many parts of the world.
Of course, there are different kinds of vegetarians ranging from vegans who exclude all animal products from diet and attire (whether or not this involves the actual death of an animal) through to Pesco or Pollo 'vegetarians' who allow fish or chicken in their diet (although most vegetarians would argue that the latter are not really kinds of vegetarianism at all).
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Sharing the middle ground are the majority of vegetarians who are called 'lacto-ovo vegetarians', meaning they also eat eggs and dairy produce, 'lacto vegetarians', who will not eat eggs but do eat dairy produce, and 'ovo vegetarians', who do not eat dairy produce but will eat eggs. All of these types of vegetarian (who eat eggs and/or dairy produce) have been shown to have some of the lowest mortality rates in the world.
Curiously vegans have some of the highest mortality rates, even higher than regular meat eaters. And 'pesco' vegetarians (people who eat a little fish in their diet) have as low a mortality rate as, or lower than, lacto and/or ovo vegetarians. Speculation is that vegans are not getting enough of the right kinds of proteins in their diet, but research is still in its early stages.
But whatever kind of vegetarian a person is, and whatever their reasons - and whatever kind of vegetarian diet we may be discussing, for the sake of simplicity we simply use the term 'vegetarian' on this site.
- Robin Nixon |
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