Vegetarianism
From IKTWiki
Many studies have shown that vegetarianism promotes very health living. Vegetarians generally suffer less chronic diseases and live longer than animal meat eaters.
An animal or fish meat eater may argue that you can obtain all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates by being a vegetarian but harm your health because you are not getting enough protein. This is not a valid argument. The body cannot directly use or assimilate eaten meat as protein. Meat must first be digested and converted into amino acids. The body then takes the amino acids to construct them into protein as needed. There are 23 amino acids required by the body. Studies have shown that 8 of these amino acids are obtained from the foods that we eat and the body produces the other 15. It is rare that vegetarians suffer from protein deficiency because eating a variety of vegetarian foods should provide all the necessary amino acids for the body to make protein. Further, vegetarians who include milk, cheese, and non-fertilized eggs in their diets can obtain more than enough amino acids to build protein.
Reports from world health statistics show short life expectancies for those who consume a great deal of animal flesh. People like the Eskimos and Greenlanders who lived mostly on animals usually had an average lifespan of only 30 to 40 years. The Finns who ate the most animal fats had very high blood cholesterol levels and incurred the highest death rate from heart disease. In Japan, where the consummation of animals was much less, the heart disease rate was lower than any other industrialized nation. If you ever cooked a hamburger and let it turn cold, then recall seeing the white fat surrounding the meat. Think of this fat clogging your arteries and circulatory system and you will understand why heart disease is very common among eaters of mainly meat.
Breast and colon cancers are leading causes of cancer death among the U.S. population. However, these cancers were not common among Japanese who ate 3 times less animal meat than Americans. A reason why animal eaters are more likely to have cancer is that meat decays and changes its chemical compositions rapidly. This along with sodium nitrites used by meat producers as preservatives form dangerous potential cancer causing agents called nitrosamines in the bodies. Nitrosamines are nearly non-existing in vegetarian foods. Other health problems such as gout, arthritis, weaken liver, and kidney problems may result through the eating of animals that were previously injected or fed harmful antibiotics, hormones, drugs, and other chemicals to make them grow faster and bigger.
A simple way of understanding from a spiritual point of view as to why eating meat causes harm to the body is that any digested meat probably came from an animal or fish dying fearfully and violently when killed. This undue killing created destructive negative vibrations that resided in the dead meat. Upon consummation of such meat, these negative vibrations then reside in you causing your body energies to increasingly malfunction over time as more negativity is accumulated with the continued eating of meat.
Concerns for our environment, world hunger, and saving our natural resources are also strong considerations for being a vegetarian. It takes about 4 pounds, 6 pounds, and 9 pounds of grain feed to produce 1 pound of chicken, pork, and beef, respectively. Obviously, the extra plant feed needed to produce animal meat can be used instead to feed hungry people of the world. In addition, animal waste that cannot be properly recycled at the farms is increasing polluting our environment.
