21 Reasons To Become A Vegetarian

• Avoiding meat is one of the best and simplest ways to cut down your fat consumption. Modern farm animals are deliberately fattened up to increase profits. Eating fatty meat increases your chances of having a heart attack or developing a cancer.  
• Ever minute of every working day, thousands of animals are killed in slaughter houses. In the US alone 500,000 animals are killed for meat every hour. 
• There are millions of recorded cases of food poisoning every year, the vast majority of which are caused by eating meat.
• Meat contains absolutely nothing - no proteins, no vitamins, no minerals - that the human body cannot obtain perfectly happy from a vegetarian diet.  
• African countries - that are suffering starvation - export grain to the developed world so that animals can be fattened for our dining tables. 
• "Meat" can include the feet, head, tail, rectum and/or spinal chord of any animal.
• A sausage can contain ground up intestines, and no one can actually be sure the intestines were empty when they were ground up. Do you really want to eat the contents of a pigs intestines? 
• If we eat the plants we grow, instead of feeding them to the animals we eat the worlds food shortage will disappear virtually over night. One-hundred acres of land will produce enough beef to feed only 20 people, but enough wheat to feed over 240 people.  
• Everyday, tens of millions of one day old male chicks are killed because they will not be able to lay eggs. There are no rules about how this mass slaughter takes place. Some are crushed or suffocated to death, others are used as fertilizers or to feed other animals. 
• Animals that die in slaughter houses for your dinner table die alone, scared and in pain. This killing is merciless and inhumane. 
• It's much easier to stay slim and maintain a healthy weight if you are a vegetarian.
• Half the rain forests in the world have been destroyed to clear the ground to graze cattle for beef burgers. The burning of the forest contributes to 20% of the worlds green house gases! Roughly 1,000 species a year become extinct because of the destruction of the rain forests. Approximately sixty million people die a year of starvation. Almost all those lives could be saved if they could eat the grain used to feed this livestock, if Americans were to eat just 10% less meat. 
• The World's fresh water shortage has been made much worse by animal farming. And meat producers are the biggest water polluters out there. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce only 1 pound of meat. If the UK and US meat industries were not supported by tax payers paying large portions of their water costs, hamburger meat would cost $35/£25 per pound.
• If you eat meat you are consuming hormones fed to the animals. No one knows what effect those hormones will have on your health. In some parts of the world as many as one on four hamburgers contain growth hormones given to cattle. 
• The following disease are common among meat eaters: Anemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostate, constipation, diabetes, gallstones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, piles, strokes and varicose veins. Lifelong vegetarians visit hospital 22% less often then meat eaters, and usually only have to stay for shorter periods. Vegetarians also have a 20% lower blood cholesterol than meat eaters which reduces their chances of suffering from heart attacks and cancer considerably. 
  
• Some farmers use tranquilizers to keep animals calm. Others use antibiotics to starve off infections, when you eat meat you are eating those drugs. In America 55% of all antibiotics are fed to animals and t he percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin went up from 14% in 1960 to 91% by 1988. 
• In a lifetime the average meat eater will consume 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and turkeys. 
• It's well know that animals suffer from both pain and fear just as humans do. How would you like to spend our last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animals, and the cruelly pushed into a blood soaked slaughter chamber? 
• Animals of only a year old are often far more rational and capable of logical and intelligent thought than human babies from 6 weeks up. Eating dead animals is barbaric. 
• The vast majority of vegetarians are natural fitter than  meat eaters. Many of the world's most accomplished and famous athletes live on vegetarian diets.