5 Reasons to Live Vegan
Vegans do completely without animal products. But why? Here you can find out the five most important reasons for a vegan lifestyle!
Almost everyone knows at least one person in their circle of friends or acquaintances: vegans who completely avoid animal products. Particularly irritating for the bystanders becomes it above all if he or she even renounces certain beverages. If you take a closer look, you will find that certain wines, juices & etc. are clarified with gelatine. This comes as a surprise and often enough the question arises as to what one can eat or drink at all.
But contrary to the general belief, vegan people do not live on salad and water alone! Most of them have perfectly adapted their nutrition and lifestyle and usually know best about a balanced diet and food without animal ingredients. And their reasons for this form of nutrition are quite plausible – or at least make you think about it!
1. Health aspects
Doing without meat has many health benefits and has a positive effect on cholesterol levels, among other things. Banning completely animal products from your diet also reduces the likelihood of suffering from obesity, diabetes or arthritis.
It also avoids all the harmful by-products that can be ingested through the consumption of animal foods: It is no longer a secret that conventional agriculture, and especially intensive livestock farming, leaves antibiotics in meat, pesticides in honey or eggs contaminated with harmful substances – something that unfortunately even foods with the organic seal are not always completely spared.
2. Avoidance of animal suffering
Male chicks that are shredded alive immediately after hatching, calves that are separated from their mothers shortly after birth, or several chickens that have to share a single square metre – the list is almost endless and shows the worst effects of our consumer economy, whose principles focus on quantity rather than quality. Even if we pay attention to organic products and support regional agriculture, there are still plenty of foods that hide animal products in any ingredient. And the extraction of these ingredients is unfortunately all too often associated with a high level of animal suffering. In order to avoid this, the consequent conclusion is to renounce animal products completely in the end and to eat vegan food.
3. Ecological reasons
Livestock farming is not only responsible for high water consumption, it also has an impact on the greenhouse effect and land degradation. The causes are obvious: animals need to be watered and fed, and the feedstuffs also require constant irrigation during cultivation – the result is a very high water consumption for animal husbandry. The greenhouse effect is in turn exacerbated by the gas methane, for example, which is emitted by cows and has 25 times the effect of CO2. And last but not least, huge areas of rainforest are cleared to make way for pastures or to grow feed for livestock.
4. Livestock farming worsens world hunger
Corn, grain and soya are fed to millions of farm animals, only to end up on their plates in the form of a few steaks. The idea is therefore simple: why not use the plant-based foods grown directly to feed people, when over 800 million people around the world suffer from hunger?
5. You are what you eat!
Vegans in most cases deal very intensively with their nutrition. It’s often not possible to get something on your plate quickly: fast food or convenience products often contain powdered milk, egg or additives with E numbers that come from animal products. Cooking fresh and studying the list of ingredients is therefore the motto for vegan people. This has the nice side effect that they are very conscious about their food, consume few ready-made foods and generally know what they are eating.
Vegan lifestyle: But what about B12?
Admittedly, switching to a vegan diet requires some research, effort and time – but the reasons are obvious. And whoever now mentions B12 deficiency as a counter-argument, it should be said that vitamin B12 can also be taken up without problems via food supplements. B12 is in fact the only vitamin that is not available in a purely plant-based diet and a deficiency of this vitamin can lead to health problems. Regular monitoring is therefore essential.
Living a vegan life can therefore not only have a positive effect on health and the environment, it also avoids animal suffering and sensitizes people to their own diet. Nevertheless a varied nutrition and the knowledge of the different nutrients is the A & O also with the vegan way of life. If the change to a purely vegan diet is too drastic for you, you are already doing something good if you reduce animal products significantly and look around for all the vegetable, tasty alternatives. And it’s even really fun, because Seitan, Tempeh and Jackfruit open up completely new flavours and interesting recipes. Try it out!