Most non-vegan people think that being vegan is hard. Some of them even think that being vegetarian is hard. But being vegan or transitioning to veganism is actually really easy, especially in 2018. The word “vegan” has existed since the 1940s so if people could be vegan then, even before all the big vegan food companies were founded, it’s definitely easy to be vegan now. Some of them think it’s also useless and demonstrate this idea with arguments like “I love meat”, “but protein”, “animals will overpopulate” or the famous “lions eat meat.” But there are a lot of reasons to go vegan: ethics, environment, health.
In 2018, we can totally live without consuming any animal products. We don’t need any milk after the weaning, and the only milk we need before is the milk from our mother. Drinking milk after the weaning doesn’t do anything good for the body, A lot of people even have lactose intolerance. And like the meat industry, the dairy industry is incredibly cruel. Many people still think that the cows have to be milked or it becomes painful for them. But it’s actually not true and the cows have to be forcefully inseminated and have babies (directly sent to the meat industry) to produce milk, like every other mammals on earth, including humans.
The meat industry is horrible too, every animals’ death is programmed since the day they were born. They are tortured their entire life and get killed to become hamburgers or hams. Plus animal products are really dirty, they are full of the animals’ hormones – and you really don’t want to have cow’s hormones in a human body, especially if you want to stay healthy – bacterias, dioxins and other toxins and mostly antibiotics. All of that can cause serious health problems. And a high percentage of all the meat produced is contaminated by E. coli and bacterias from intestinal tracts and feces of the animals. They can also cause food poisoning, 75 millions cases are known each other, with 5000 that are fatal. They can even cause cancer development, gynecomastia (enlarged male breasts) and obesity.
Heart diseases and type 2 diabetes are two of the common chronic diseases in the world and are completely man-made. Animal products are rich in saturate fat and cholesterol and are a major contributor to these diseases. Actually, if you start a low-fat vegan diet at a early stage of the disease (often when you are a child) you can reverse the illness!
For the environment, most of the pollution doesn’t come from the cars but from the animal agriculture. For example, the production of 1 pound of meat causes the emission of 75 kg of CO2, you produce the same amount of CO2 when you use your car for 3 weeks. All this population and deforestation causes a mass extinction of species impacting 86% of all the mammals, 86% of all the birds and 88% of all the amphibians.
Finally, all of the above is about the vegan diet, but veganism also includes boycotting any products tested on animals, clothes and furnitures made with animal skin and any amusement parks and circus that have animals (including zoos). Someone who only follows the diet and not all the other sides of the lifestyle is plant-based and not vegan!