Part 2
There is yet another concern. Antibiotics as well as other drugs, including steroids and growth hormones, are either added to the animal feed or injected directly into the animals. It has been reported that people eating these animals will absorb these drugs into their bodies. There is a possibility that antibiotics in meat are diminishing the effectiveness of antibiotics for human use.
There are some people who consider the vegetarian diet not sufficiently nourishing. An American surgical expert, Dr. Miller, practises medicine for 40 years in Taiwan. He established a hospital there, where all the meals were vegetarian, for staff members as well as the patients. He said, “The mouse is one kind of animal which can support its life with both a vegetarian and non-vegetarian diet. If two nice are segregated, with one eating meat and the other eating vegetarian food, we find that their growth and development are the same, but that the vegetarian mouse lives longer and has greater resistance to disease. Furthermore, when the two mice got sick, the vegetarian mouse recovered quicker.”
He then added, “The medicine given to us by modern science has improved greatly, but it can only treat illnesses. Food, however, can sustain our health. Food from plants is a more direct source of nutrition than meat. People eat animals, but the source of nutrition for the animals we eat is plants. The lives of most animals are short, and animals have nearly all the diseased that humans have. It is very likely that the diseases of humans come from eating the flesh of dead animals. So, why don’t people get their nutrition directly from plants?”
Dr. Miller suggested that we only need cereals, beans and vegetables to get all the nourishment we need to maintain good health.
Many people have the idea that animal protein is ‘superior’ to plant protein because animals are considered a complete protein, and plants are incomplete. The truth is that some plant proteins are complete, and that food combining can create complete proteins out of several incomplete protein foods.
In March 1988 the American Dietetic Association announced that: ‘It is the position of the ADA that vegetarian diets are healthful and nutritionally adequate when appropriately planned.’
It is often falsely believed that meat-eaters are stronger than vegetarians, but many experiments conducted, including one by Professor Irving Fisher of Yale University on 32 vegetarians and 15 meat-eaters showed that vegetarians had more endurance than meat-eaters. Many long-distance track athletes keep a vegetarian diet for the time preceding competitions. Dr. Barbara More, an expert in vegetarian therapy, completed a 110 mile race in 27 hours, 30 minutes. A woman of 56 years of age, she broke all the records held by much younger men. She said, “I want to be an example to show that people who take a whole vegetarian diet will enjoy a strong body, a clear mind and a purified life.”
Do vegetarians get enough protein in their diet? The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that 4.5% of daily calories should come from protein. Wheat has 17%, broccoli has 45% and rice has 8%. It is very easy to have a protein-rich diet without eating meat. With the additional benefit of avoiding the many diseases and cancers, vegetarianism is clearly the superior choice.
The relationship between over-consumption of meat and other animal source foods containing high levels of saturated fats, and heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer and strokes has been proven. Other diseases which are often prevented and sometimes cured by a low fat vegetarian diet include: kidney stones, prostate cancer, diabetes, peptic ulcers, gallstones, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), arthritis, gum disease, ane, pancreatic cancer, stomach cancer, hypoglycaemia, constipation, diverticulitis, hypertension, osteoporosis, ovarian cancer, haemorrhoids, obesity and asthma. There is no greater personal health risk than eating meat, aside from smoking.
Please note: Green Dean is strictly opposed to any form of animal testing and experimentation on animals for any purposes.