Eight Reasons to Become a Vegan

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Part One – Health Reasons

Veganism is the practice of eliminating the use of animal products. So what do vegans eat? Fruit, vegetables, nuts, beans and seeds make up most the diet. What don’t vegans eat? Meat, fish, seafood, cheese, eggs, milk, dairy products, and anything with eyes, a nose and a mouth are not vegan.

I also keep at a minimum all concentrated foods, including vegetable oil, sugar, salt, seasonings and margarine. Nuts should also be limited, as they are wholesome, but high in fat and protein, and only people exercising regularly should eat lots of them. Chemicals and preservatives are not food, and should not be eaten at all.

Today my meals went something like this;

Breakfast:      Frozen whole wheat waffles from Trader Joes, with Almond Butter from Fresh & Easy, and stewed fruit. The stewed fruit was made with fresh blueberries, fresh blackberries, fresh strawberries, frozen mangos and pineapple juice; it was thickened with one tablespoon of corn starch, a concentrated food.

Lunch:                        Stir-fried vegetables with tofu and Morningstar Farms Grillers – a soy protein meat substitute. The vegetables included broccoli, red bell peppers, onions, cilantro, green peas and water chestnuts.

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Dinner:           Whole Wheat Pasta, with Cashew Tomato Cheese sauce, topped with fajita vegetables.

So why would you become a vegan?

1. The huge reduction in fat and sugar, and the resulting reduction in calories, of course causes weight loss overweight persons. Vegan body builders eat lots of soy and wheat protein, as well as nuts, and get good bulk and incredible definition with very low body fat. Average vegans weigh about 30 pounds less than non-vegetarians. You can be skinny!
2. No animal product means any cholesterol at all in your diet. The average person will see a drop in blood pressure, and their cholesterol will go way down.
3. Many slaughter houses cut open animals and find tumors or cancerous organs. Often they will cut this out and put it in the meat to go into hotdogs or bologna, or cut it out and throw it away. However, if an animal has a cancerous tumor, it is carried in the blood stream throughout the entire animal’s body. Eat the hotdog made from the cancerous animal, and you are now enjoying fresh cancer viruses on a bun. Vegans have almost 34% less cancer than the average American.*
4.  If you have lower fat, lower cholesterol and more fiber in your diet, you can expect to reduce your risk of heart attacks or heart disease. Vegans have about a 40% reduction in risk of heart disease. **
5. Less expense. Beans are cheaper than steak, and tofu is cheaper than lobster. Expect your restaurant bills to be cut in half.
6. Reduced risk of diabetes. No sodas, no ice cream and no candy bars mean no diabetes, and much happier visits to the dentist.
7. The fiber you will be eating from all of that whole grain, vegetables and fruit will clean your system out, and reduce the toxic waste in your colon and intestine. Any kind of liver problem due to drug or alcohol use will be improved. Constipation is rare.
8. 
   

Ellen and Brad Pitt are Vegan because Thin is In

How to get started

Get some vegan cookbooks, and find interesting looking recipes. Make a shopping list from the ingredients. Plan on shopping at a natural food store like Whole Foods or Trader Joes for some of the items, as a regular grocery store will not carry them. 

At a farmer’s market or grocery store, get every kind of fresh fruit and vegetables that look good to you.

Then you want to buy dry beans and grains. The last time I went shopping I bought lentils, spit peas, pinto beans, black beans, black eyed peas, and kidney beans. For grains I bought old fashion oatmeal, corn meal, whole barley, brown rice, couscous, millet and bulgur wheat.

Make sure to get whole grain bread, whole grain crackers, almond or soy milk, fruit juice, humus, salad fixings and several kinds of nuts. I always have raw cashews, raw almonds, raw walnuts and shredded coconut.  

Try to go from where you are now to completely vegan in a month or two. Go through your cupboards, and get rid of things that will tempt you.Think about buying some small kitchen appliance to help you. A blender, a food processer, a juicer, a popcorn air popper and a crock pot are things you should consider.

What to do about your family

Leave them behind and join a vegan commune. Just kidding! Take them out to Subway, you order the veggie patty with sweet onion sauce on Honey Oat or Whole Wheat. They can order chicken, beef or whatever they like, but suggest they try the whole grain bread instead of white. Take them to Burger King and get the veggie burger, or take them to Chipotle Mexican Grill, and get the black bean burrito with veggie fajitas, brown rice and guacamole, again vegan, but your family can get chicken, pork, beef, etc. 

You will have to wash more dishes; however the following method will work for most families. Start with a skillet or pot with the base part of your dish. This could be stir-fry vegetables, whole wheat pasta, brown rice or other basic dish. In a separate pan, cook whatever meat or seafood your family enjoys. This could be chicken, shrimp, beef, etc. In a third pan or skillet, cook tofu, soy meat or textured vegetable protein for you. 

When you serve stir-fried fajita vegetables, for example, perhaps your family’s version would be topped with chicken, and your version would be topped with farfel, tofu or veggie meat. 

The health benefits of becoming a vegan are overwhelming. I myself have lost 45 pounds since June 2011, and my doctor took me off the diabetic medication he had just put me on a few months earlier because I no longer needed it. I have more energy, my mind is clearer, and people say I look ten years younger. This leads me to reason eight:

• Longer life. The study quoted earlier regarding less heart disease and cancer in vegans, also turned up another interesting fact. Vegans can live 11 to 12 years longer than the average American!*** OK, it’s not immortality, but hey, wouldn’t you rather be hiking, mountain biking, swimming, sailing, and other active sports in your 80s, then be confined to a bed in your 50s or 60s because you have had heart attacks, strokes or diabetes?

In our next discussion, we will look at how if enough people become vegans, it will stop global warming, world hunger and help save the planet. Sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Let’s just start with you and me becoming vegans, and go from there.

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Loma Linda University, a Seventh-Day Adventist school in Southern California, has been studying vegetarian and vegan Seventh-Day Adventists since the 1950s. Their second population study in the 1970s compared 96,000 vegetarians and vegans to the general population group. A sample of the result is below.

·         The Adventist Health Study: Findings for Coronary Heart Disease

Extensive studies of coronary heart disease have been conducted among Adventists, both in the United States and abroad. However, the Adventist Health Study has gone an important step further in collecting data on both fatal and non-fatal cases of coronary heart disease.

For fatal cases of coronary heart disease, the older Adventist Mortality Study found that the mortality rates for Adventist men in particular were only 66 percent as compared to their non-Adventist counterparts. When compared only to non-smoking non-Adventists, the figure rose to 76 percent. Differences for women were less impressive.

See http://www.llu.edu/public-health/health/heart.page?

** Lifestyle, Diet and Disease

Our data show a progressive weight increase from a total vegetarian diet toward a non-vegetarian diet. For instance, 55-year-old male and female vegans weigh about 30 pounds less than non-vegetarians of similar height. Additionally, levels of cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, and the metabolic syndrome all had the same trend – the closer you are to being a vegetarian, the lower the health risk in these areas. In the case of type 2 diabetes, prevalence in vegans and lacto-ovo vegetarians was half that of non-vegetarians, even after controlling for socioeconomic and lifestyle factors.
See http://www.llu.edu/public-health/health/lifestyle_disease.page

*** Overall cancer mortality, comparing Adventists to their American Cancer Society counterparts, was 60 percent for Adventist men and 76 percent for Adventist women.
Comparing specific types of cancer deaths, with the non-Adventist population as the standard, lung cancer deaths among Adventists were 21 percent. Colo-rectal cancer deaths were 62 percent among Adventists.
Breast cancer death rates for Adventist women were 85 percent; prostate cancer death rates for Adventist men were 92 percent. For lymphoma or leukemia, the death rates stood at 86 percent for Adventist men and 100 percent for Adventist women.

Death from coronary heart disease among Adventist men was 66 percent; for Adventist women, it was 98 percent. Stroke death rates for Adventist men were 72 percent, compared to their non-Adventist counterparts. For Adventist women, death from stroke was 82 percent.

Comparing all causes of death among the two populations, Adventist men had a death rate of 66 percent and Adventist women had a rate of 88 percent.

Since smoking has been shown to be a major factor in causing diseases such as cancer, researchers from the Adventist Mortality Study compared the mortality rates of non-smokers from both populations. As would be expected, the mortality rates for these non-Adventists were closer to those of the Adventists. However, an advantage for the Adventists generally persisted which could now not be accounted for by differences in tobacco use. Thus, other characteristics of Adventists, apart from their non-smoking status, such as diet and perhaps social support, are also clearly important in reducing the risk of disease.

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All cancer mortality among Adventists, as compared to their non-smoking non-Adventist counterparts, was 85 percent for Adventist men and 78 percent for Adventist women

See http://www.llu.edu/public-health/health/mortality.page?

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