Reasons To Go Vegetarian In 2019

Once upon a time, vegetarianism was a taboo term at the dinner table. And if you go way back to when our ancestors had to hunt and food was scarce, eating meat was a necessity for survival. Thanks to the agricultural revolution and the advanced technology of today, meat is a commodity and consuming meat is a lifestyle choice. With growing health problems like obesity and heart disease, vegetarianism is gaining more popularity for its health benefits.

It seems everywhere you go, there's a vegetarian option to accommodate this stride towards healthier living. Even celebrities like Natalie Portman and Jared Leto have turned to a plant-based diet, and many more people are converting each day. Whether a person turns to vegetarianism because they watched a PETA video or because they're simply looking to shed a few pounds, the health benefits stay the same. If you previously thought it was way too hard to make the veg plunge, 2019 may be your year. The change has never been easier, or tastier, than it is today, and when it comes to motivation, there are many good reasons to adopt a vegetarian lifestyle.

Climate change is no joke. NASA explains global warming is rapidly increasing and is the result of our lifestyle since the mid-20th century. We've seen changes, for the worse, in Mother Earth like the global temperate spike, the rise in sea level, and higher acidity in the ocean. Greenhouse gases coming from agriculture are partially to blame for these changes. But not all foods emit the same amount of greenhouse gases. 

The Environmental Working Group found that beef production emits over ten times more greenhouse gases than most vegetables and plant-based foods. Most of the beef industry's greenhouse gas emissions come from the animal's waste, while a large amount is the result of the agricultural means needed to feed them. And we're not talking a little bit of food here and there. We're talking an average of 30 pounds of hay a day per cow. That's a lot of food to be fed to a cow who's going to be slaughtered anyway. 

A report published by the World Resources Institute explains that eating less meat could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 15-35 percent, and adopting a vegetarian diet could drastically lower it even more.

Many Americans are aware of the inhumanity that can be found in slaughterhouses, but some still choose to look the other way. The mere concept of grouping hundreds, if not thousands, of living chickens in a small space only to kill them is a horrific one. Yet this is a dark part of our society's behavior due to the mass consumption of poultry.

There are laws to reduce the pain and suffering chickens experience when slaughtered like the use of stunning — electrocuting animals into unconsciousness. However, scientists have found (via HuffPost) that many farmers' chosen method of low-voltage stunning doesn't effectively put the bird into an unconscious state. This leads to an estimated 90 million chickens to die painfully awake. 

It seems the U.S. legislation is well aware of this problem, but hasn't done much to improve the situation. Steve Wotton, a researcher at the University of Bristol's School of Veterinary Sciences, addressed this problem to HuffPost, "The U.S. settings that have been reported to me and that I've read in published papers are far too low to stun."

America, the land of the brave and the home of the free. The nation known for supersizing meals, stress eating, and celebrating whatever we can with barbecue and lots of beer. A lifestyle like this does not end well and we're seeing the effects of it with one rising health concern. You guessed it, obesity.

According to the Center For Disease Control and Prevention, obesity impacted 39 percent of Americans in 2015-2016. But this deadly epidemic could be improved with some simple dietary changes. A ten-year study conducted by the University of Navarra in Spain proved that reducing, or better yet, completely removing meat from your diet can lower your risk of obesity by 43 percent. This isn't the first time vegetarianism has shown its miraculous wonders for weight loss. 

A team of researchers from the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine in Washington D.C. found that diabetic subjects who followed a vegetarian diet lost twice as much weight as those who followed a carnivorous diet. Dr. Hana Kahleová explained of his findings (via Science Daily), "we also showed that a vegetarian diet is much more effective at reducing muscle fat, thus improving metabolism."

It's easy to think of cows as grass-grazing animals without a care in the world, nor much brain power. However, cows have more advanced emotional states than most people would think. An experiment conducted by Kristin Hagen and Donald M Broom measured the emotional reactions of cattle when learning something new. They broke the cattle into two groups — the first group was taught to open a gate which led to a reward of food. The second group was simply just given the food reward. The scientists also measured the cow's heart rates and speed in which they moved towards the food reward. The cows who were taught to open the gate moved faster towards the food and had faster heart rates. This concluded that cattle respond emotionally to their learning advancements. 

Another essay, The Psychology of Cows, expresses cows' ability to discriminate towards people who have exposed roughness towards them. "Calves as well as adult cows show learned fear responses to humans who have previously handled them in a rough manner," wrote Lori Marino and Kristin Allen. Understanding that cows embody emotions, just like us, can make it harder to justify killing them.

Type 2 diabetes affects approximately 29.1 million Americans according to Healthline. The condition is incurable and patients living with it must carefully watch what they eat and draw blood from their finger daily to monitor glucose levels. There's a fairly easy way to lower your risk of getting type 2 diabetes that most people don't know about. Judging by the title of this article, you can probably guess what it is.

Ambika Satija and her team of researchers analyzed data from over 200,000 health professionals and studied the influence of a vegetarian diet on type 2 diabetes. She concluded that a vegetarian diet can reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes by 20 percent. They even broke down the vegetarian diets and separated them into various groups, identifying some versions of the diet to be healthier than others. She found that the healthiest version of a plant-based diet can reduce your diabetes risk, even more, by nearly 34 percent. If you want to lower your risk, adopting a vegetarian diet may be just what you need to dodge the life-threatening disease completely.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart attacks are one of the most common killers and are responsible for 25 percent of American deaths. High cholesterol is one of the main triggers of a heart attack and is fueled by high fat intake that is often found in meat, greasy fast food, and baked goods. One of the key factors in high cholesterol is spiked concentration levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL), otherwise known as "bad cholesterol" in your bloodstream.

According to a study published in 2017 in Nutrition Reviews, a vegetarian diet was found to significantly lower the chance of heart attack by reducing LDL levels. These results proved that a plant-based diet can decrease "bad cholesterol" from 15-30 percent in comparison to omnivorous diets. This study shows evidence that eating your veggies can really pay off and help you live a longer, heart-healthy life. 

Years ago, pursuing a vegetarian diet would have been hard to achieve, but these days it's a piece of cake — vegan cake, if you must. The internet is packed with endless vegetarian resources overflowing with tasty meatless recipes that even carnivores would enjoy. Not to mention, restaurants and grocery stores across the country have a variety of creative plant-based proteins from Quorn's Chik'n Tenders to Beyond Meat's Hot Italian Sausages. If you thought that fast food was out of the question for vegetarians, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Carl's Jr. has a Beyond Burger (made with a Beyond Meat patty), Taco Bell has, well, everything (just replace meat with beans and/or potatoes in any meal), and even White Castle has a vegan slider.

Vegetarians know that it's sometimes hard to tell if a food is actually meat-free. That's when an app like Is It Vegan? comes to save the day. This app tells you whether an item is vegetarian or vegan so there are no more unpleasant surprises. Another app, called Protein Tracker, helps veg heads ensure they are consuming enough protein. If this isn't proof that times have changed and meat-free living is easier than ever, we don't know what is!