By Louisiane L
Environmental Benefits
One of the best ways of helping the environment and reducing your impact on the environment is becoming vegetarian. Researchers have shown that being vegetarian reduces your ecological impact by nearly 500 kg of CO2 per year (1). The UN reports that livestock generates more greenhouse gases than all vehicles, planes and all forms of transport in the world combined. In addition to this, a vegetarian diet uses 6 times less land space than a regular omnivore diet. Enormous amounts of water are being used to raise animals, going veggie helps reduce water wasting. Only 1kg of beef takes 15,500 L of water to make while the same amount of potato requires 210 L of water, this is more than 70 times less.
Reducing Famine
Along with environmental benefits, vegetarianism could help reduce famine. 70% of grain produced in the US goes to animals raised for slaughter. According to David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology at Cornell University, 800 million people could be fed with grain currently fed to livestock.
Animal Life
Ten billion animals are slaughtered a year for our consumption; a large percentage of these animals are factory farmed which means they are raised in cages and spend their lives there. Why do you refuse to eat your pets? Why is it frowned upon to eat kittens and puppies but not lambs and calves? This is why one of the most common reasons for becoming vegetarian is animal treatment.
Personal Benefits
If you aren’t already convinced of going veggie for environmental and animal benefits, being vegetarian can also help improve your health and wallet. A vegetarian diet can reduce the risk of chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, certain types of cancer and obesity. It is also believed that vegetarian diets help you live longer and slows the ageing process. Being vegetarian reduces chances of food poisoning and salmonella as well. Contrary to popular belief, vegetarian diets are not more expensive than omnivore diets. A vegetarian diet can help reduce bills by over £3,000 (roughly €3,385).
Humans now eat twice as much meat as we did in 1960. Overall, vegetarianism has numerous advantages in many different aspects of life. Vegetarian diets do not exclusively help save animals, it helps save the environment and improves your health.
(1) Your carbon footprint or annual CO2 emissions is a measure of how much fossil fuel is emitted as a result of your daily activities.
To further your reading these articles are the articles I based my research on:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/18/vegetarianism-save-planet-environment
https://www.vegetariantimes.com/health-and-nutrition/why-go-veg-learn-about-becoming-a-vegetarian
https://www.downtoearth.org/go-veggie/top-10-reasons
10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Go Vegan
