In this post I will explain you why a Vegan Lifestyle might be VERY RELEVANT to YOU. (+2 Videos)
ATTENTION! I'm not telling you what to do, I'm only sharing information and what you do with the information is up to you.
Now, you might be thinking omg.. another radical vegan trying to convince me of his view.
But just wait a second, maybe these "annoying" people have a reason behind preaching veganism all the time. Stay tuned because I'm going to explain in depth why you shouldn't consume some products and what better alternatives you can opt for.
I will also point you to humane compromises, on how you can still consume some animal products while staying healthy & environment-friendly.
I hope you've seen the movie matrix. In it, the main character, Neo has the choice between taking a blue and a red pill.
The red pill symbolizes the truth and the blue pill the distorted, unreal & "beautiful" reality. It's what we want to hear, It's the lies we tell ourselves.
And in this post I'm going to give you the red pill.
My intent is to help you, the animals & the environment by sharing with you my view about what we should be eating.
The reason why you might not be vegan is that you believe it isn't a fit for you.
You might be thinking that "We need meat, eggs, fish, dairy" to survive and eat a healthy diet.
It's the common paradigm that 99% of human beings share, because our environment, our culture has thought us so.
The deal is, we don't need anything mentioned above to survive, or live a healthy lifestyle. Becoming vegan has a powerful impact on your health, on the environment (less polution through meat industry) and on our fellow earthlings, animals.
I highly recommend you watch the film/documentary Earthlings, after reading this post. It's about humankind supressing minorities & other species, just because they have the power to do so.
We can spare them plenty of pain & stress and at the same time help our planet Earth and ourselves by leaving meat dairy & eggs off the plate.
Let's take one food at a time. Meat. Do we need to consume meat to survive?
Absolutely no. Why do people think we need meat to survive? "Because it has protein"
or "Where am I going to bet my B12 from? I don't want to take a supplement, it's not natural." While it's true that it might not be natural to take a supplement, it's still better on your health than consuming meat. There are other natural alternatives to B12 fortified foods or supplements but your safest bet is to buy a cheap B12 Supplement.
Now that we got meat out of our way, we need to talk about eggs.
Every Male chick that is born is useless for the industry, and will be thrown in a meat grinder, alive, or just thrown in the garbage, since they don't produce eggs. So if you buy eggs, you might be at risk of heart disease and support this awful practice.
Fish. This is something lots of people consider healthy. It might be healthy. But the regular fish you buy from the supermarket, that was fished from the ocean will with a high probability contain trace metals like Mercury, Cadmium Lead and others.
If there's written on fish cans not suitable for pregnant women, then I don't know if it's suitable for a healthy individual either.
The second problem with fish is overfishing.(Article on overfishing: https://goo.gl/uz2oNQ ) We are depleting our Waters of fish, and it's causing environmental damage(destroying coral reef). We don't need fish to survive, it's rather a commodity people nowadays crave. We can get our Omega 3's from Linseeds, also in perfect proportion to Omega 6's unlike meat & fish.
Next comes dairy. Dairy is nature’s perfect food — but only if you’re a calf.
If that sounds shocking to you, it’s because very few people are willing to tell the truth about dairy. In fact, criticizing milk in America is like taking on motherhood, apple pie, or baseball. But that’s just what I’m about to do.
Not everyone can stomach dairy. Approximately 65 percent of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy.(Lactose Intolerance)
Me and many other people deal with Acne, that is entirely diet-caused. You will believe me when you go vegan, your Acne disappears forever.
Not to mention that if the dairy products you're consuming are not organic, bio grass fed, you're likely taking in tons of antibiotics in form of milk.
That's because without antibiotics, animals would die from disease in such a stressful environment (See video below)
Cheese Protein, more exactly Casein contains Casomorphine, an opioid peptide (protein fragment) derived from the digestion of milk protein casein. Now we know why cheese is addictive. This may or may not be a downside, but it's still good to know. Milk has been made to be addictive in order to keep the calf on drinking, to grow big.
Dairy causes unnecessary inflammation in the gut . If you want to see what effects dairy has on your body, just exclude dairy completely for 30 days from your diet then eat dairy again and see how you feel like.
My mother told me when I was little: "You need to drink milk to have healthy, strong bones."
Paradoxically, milk actually drains your bones of calcium through it's acidity. Calcium is taken from the bones to neutralize the acidic PH of milk. While milk has some calcium, when we drink milk we lose more calcium than we get from it. Plant based sources of calcium, like Broccoli, carrots, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, kale, collards,soymilk, tofu and many more don't have these disadvantages.
According to the Nurses’ Health Study dairy may increase risk of fractures by 50 percent!
Less dairy, better bones. Countries with lowest rates of dairy and calcium consumption (like those in Africa and Asia) have the lowest rates of osteoporosis.
• Dairy may be unhealthy. Advocating dairy consumption may have negative effects on health.
• There’s no evidence that dairy is good for your bones or prevents osteoporosis — in fact, the animal protein it contains may help cause bone loss!
• Dairy is linked to prostate cancer.
• It’s full of saturated fat and is linked to heart disease
• Dairy causes digestive problems for the 75 percent of people with lactose intolerance.
• Dairy aggravates irritable bowel
Due to these concerns, many have begun to consider raw milk an alternative. But that isn’t really a healthy form of dairy either …
Yes, raw, whole, organic milk eliminates concerns like pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and the effects of homogenization and pasteurization — but to me, these benefits don’t outweigh dairy’s potential risks.
Our bodies just weren’t made to digest milk on a regular basis. Instead, most scientists agree that it’s better for us to get calcium, potassium, protein, and fats from other food sources, like whole plant foods — vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and seaweed.
In my personal case I enjoy the taste of rice milk much more than I used to like cow's milk.
Last thing that vegans don't consume is honey. Now this is a bit tricky. My grandpa has hives with bees that he takes care of, feeds etc. He makes like 100-200 Kilograms honey a year, and he sends us some too.
Vegans usually don't consume honey because they say the honey industry is inhumane, which is true. Most honey sold in supermarkets nowadays is mixed with sugar & who knows what to make more honey.
The only safe way to consume honey is if you know where it was produced, if you, like me know someone who has it's own bees and takes care of them.
And still, honey should be consumed with moderation, because honey contains between 60-90% sugar (natural sugar, made by bees).
But if you want to be called an "official vegan", which people do mostly to feed their egos, you can eat dattles & other sweet sugary stuff instead of honey. But if you're like me, stuck with 20 kilos of honey in your kitchen, you can't say it's non-ethical.
So, a couple compromises you can make, if you want to remain healthy but not become vegan:
1.Grow your own chicken & eat their eggs/ Buy eggs from farmers/ people who you know treat their chicken well.
2.Opt for grass-fed/organic/bio when making food choices.
3.Buy honey from local beekeeper.
4.Fish yourself, once in a while from local river where you know the water is clean/pure.
Coming back to the subject,
The following video might be disturbing, but that's how meat ends on our plates.
But why should you care? What's the deal with veganism?
Being vegan cures Acne, rebalances your hormones and helps your body heal and maintain it's peak health.
I don't know if you're aware of this, but the #1 cause of death in the US is heart attack. Eating meat, eggs, dairy & lots of sugar, combined with a stressful environment & emotional stress will, sooner or later, without doubt cause disease.300 animals are killed every second for us in order to eat. And they aren't killed easily, they must 1st suffer terrible conditions until they are killed. Being vegan will result in less people buying meat, leaving less profit to the meat industry, resulting in lowering the production of meat, which means less suffering & pain of cute animals.
The meat & dairy industries use 40% of the planet's surface and 1/3rd of fresh water to produce meat & dairy for us to consume. It also polluted the planet greatly through production of green house gases like methane.
There may be no other single human activity that has a bigger impact on the planet than the raising of livestock.
To come to an end, if you take your health seriously, please, please watch this detailed video on 101 reasons to go vegan. This video converted me, my father and my stepmother to veganism!!!
Before this video I knew a lot of still about vegan, at least so I thought but this covers simply everything, every reason why you should become vegan.
Remember, if you still don't want to go vegan, at least reduce meat eggs & dairy consumptions as much as possible, for your own benefit!
All in all, the world isn't black or white. Being vegan has health benefits, benefits on the environment & for the animals, but restricting honey if it's from a known ethical source is pushing it a bit too far. IMHO some people make a cult out of veganism and often use this to boost their ego, to feel superior to others.
Eating honey from known ethical sources is ok, eating eggs from self-raised chicken won't kill you and eating some self-caught fish from time to time neither. But if you don't have the guts to kill the fish yourself, better not do it. Killing an animal can be heart-breaking, but Jesus has also eaten fish in the Bible. Milk and Honey are also mentioned in the Bible, but at first God has given man plants to eat.
"I give you all plants that bear seed everywhere on Earth, and every tree bearing fruit which yields seed: they shall be yours for food. All green plants I give for food to the wild animals, to all the birds of heaven, and to all reptiles on Earth, every living creature, it shall be theirs for food." (Genesis 1:29-31)
You need to still enjoy life, focus on eating healthy but think also of the planet when making your food choices. Everyone decides for himself wether he becomes vegan or not, but doing so will have a positive impact on humanity.
You have the information now, you can decide for yourself. Thanks for your time. Have a blessed day.
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PS: Check out my other content https://steemit.com/@johnnydabaus, I'm a Personal Development Freak, Bob Proctor Fan (his Seminar here: https://goo.gl/McMkcT), Jerry Banfield Fan (Become a Partner here: https://jerrybanfield.com/partners/) Nofap & (Intermittent/Long Water/Dry)Fasting Adept.