Stop making cows! Be vegan!
Many of you here may have a preconceived idea of what being a vegan or vegetarian means. I also know some of you might have already made up your mind that you will remain faithful to the meat that we the people hold so dearly, and that’s alright.
First off I want to address that there are varying degrees of vegans and vegetarians, from activists who protest against animal cruelty, to people who simply order fries instead of chicken fingers. It’s not impossible, but it takes a lot of time and effort to change a large number of people’s views on a subject matter and actually have the majority of those people to act and change their ways. If change happened instantaneously, the globe would rebound, forests would recover, and water would be cleaner everywhere as well as the air. This drastic change is unrealistic, because humans naturally resist change-we like our steak and bacon, allot. There is something that can be done: the effects on a personal level are astonishing.

The message of being vegan is not SAVE THE COWS! Its more like.. STOP MAKING COWS! Because the 1.5 billion cows on this planet are responsible for 1/3 of the dilution of the layer of the atmosphere that keeps all of us from getting toasted with radiation.

By fetching meat from the grocery store you are supporting the companies that farm or harvest the animals that they come from, and the conditions and the way they make a profit is twisted in a sort of way. Talk about business morality. Comparable to the effects of steroids, the major companies pump the animals full of hormones the make them grow faster, get fatter faster, and ultimately die faster to be processed faster. Unfortunately a lot of those hormones make their way to the package and have a similar effect on the consumers.

Vegetarians have a lower chance of developing heart disease than meat-eaters, according to a study published in the March 1998 issue of the journal "Public Health Nutrition." This large-scale study was undertaken by researchers of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Oxford, England, and studied a total of 76,172 women and men living in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany. Of this total, 27,808 study subjects were vegetarians who ate neither meat nor fish. Overall, vegetarians were found to have a 24 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who ate meat.

This next part comes from the bottom of my heart, I love meat.. I honestly do, and this love will never be able to be replaced by tofu, or almond cheese, but I can only enjoy a piece of bacon for so long, and the affects although they might be small, affect your health for the rest of your life. It’s difficult to wrap your head around, but the choices that one makes do not always take affect right away or in a week, even a month later.

It’s weird laying it out there because we are at the tipping point where we are really in control of how we lead the rest of our lives, we are choosing schools, professions, and our eating habits as well. All of these choices are going to affect us and the people around us for the rest of our lives.

Some might say that’s how it has always been, we make animal, then eat animal, and that’s how it will always be, but be aware that it doesn’t have to be. So the next time you are standing in front of the deli, stop and take a moment to think about who you are supporting, because its defiantly not yourself.