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Types of vegans and vegetarians.

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I am convinced that absolute borders don't exist and therefore you cannot truly categorise anyone or anything. Oh the irony, as people find great satisfaction in labeling and classifying stuff and other people. Lists and categories, we love 'em. Including me. So after searching in vain for a complete list of different kinds of vegans, I had came to the conclusion such thing doesn't exist yet. Therefore, I decided to make one myself.

In this post I listed all types of vegans and vegetarians (together called 'vega's') by diet style. From flexitarian to Raw Till 4-vegan - you fnd them all here. If any movement slipped my attention, please let me know.

Just one thing I want to say before you read on: with these types of vegans and vegetarians I do not state anything about the potential health benefits or -risks of their diet styles. I am not a dietitian, and there are very few scientific studies that examined the short- and long term effects of a the diets I listed. So reading and eating is at your own risk ;). Now, that being said, let's move on to all types of vegans and vegetarians there are!

Omnivore

I'll start with the one that acutally doesn't fit in this list: the omnivore. Omnivores eat meat, fish, dairy, eggs and plant-based products on a regular basis, which makes them excluded from the vegan/vegetarian list. Still I'd like to mention this group, because to be fair, vegans and vegetarians are still in the stark minority compared to omnivores.

Vegetarian

A modern vegetarian does not eat animal tissues but does eat products produced by animals, such as dairy and eggs. This group of vegetarians is also called Lacto-Ovo vegetarian, where 'lacto' stands for diary and 'ovo' for eggs. Some vegetarians do not buy leather, products with gelatin in it, or cheese with rennet, since these products are derived from the body of a dead animal. Most vegetarians however just stick to the diet rules and are more flexible when it comes to gelatin, rennet and leather.

There are different types of vegetarians out there. Like these:

This group of vegetarians does consume dairy, but not eggs. Their diet is therefore somewhat more restrictive than that of the lacto-ovo vegetarian, who consumes both eggs and dairy. Lacto-vegetarians also do not take products with eggs as an ingredient, such as mayonnaise, some cookies or cake.

* Ovo-vegetarian

Ovo-vegetarians leave dairy out of their diet, but do choose to eat eggs. In addition, ovo-vegetarians do not consume products with milk protein or lactose, and you won't find them buying goat- or sheep yogurt or cheese.

Semi-Vegetarian

Many vegetarians and vegans did not stop eating animal products overnight. Often there is a phase-out time, that could be called semi-vegetarianism. The group of semi-vegetarians is quite large, also because a lot of semi-vegetarians are unaware that they are semi-vegetarians.

They are the ones who decide to eat less meat for sake of the planet, health-conscious people who vowed to never pollute their bodies with processed meat again, the 'I'd-love-to' vegetarians that never could say goodbye to sushi or chicken wings, and your little brother who declares to be a truly dedicated vegetarian while dipping another toast in his surimi salad.

No jokes: I am a fan of semi-vegetarians. Especially those that take semi-vegetarianism as a first step towards a vega life. That first step is often the hardest, because you got to say farwell to so many convenient foods you love, and you are still unaware of the vast extend of plant-based options. So to all vega's out there: cheer at semi-vegetarians. Give them their well-deserved pat on the shoulder. And if you happen to be a semi-vega yourself, you get a pat from me. 🙂

A flexitarian follows the rules of a vegetarian diet, but occasionally eats meat or fish. Most of the time, flexitarians refrain from eating meat for several days a week, which makes flexitarianism different from semi-vegetarianism. Though as with the former, flexitarianism is often the first conscious step towards a vegetarian or vegan diet. As with flexitarians, flexans eat mainly plant-based, but consume animal products now and then. Vegetarians and vegans who don't buy animal products themselves but do eat it with other people or at a restaurant belong to this category.

* Part-time Vegetarian / Vegan

While flexitarians and flexans eat animal products on a regular basis, part-time vegetarians and vegans follow their respective diets for a longer time. After a few weeks or months eating vegetarian or vegan, they start to include (mostly little) animal products in their diet again, and eventually switch back to their old regime. This cycle continues.

Pescetarians do not eat meat but do eat fish. Crustacians and shellfish such as shrimps and mussels, are also included generally. The motivation for pescetarians to skip meat but not fish varies from health to preference, or both.

In the fridge of a pollotarian you will find chicken and other poultry, but no other sources of meat and fish. Pollo- and pescetarians differ from many semi-vegetarians in that they stick to their diet and are less likely to become a 'true' vegetarian or vegan.

Vegan

Vegans do not eat any animal products. This means no meat, fish, dairy, eggs or honey. Veganism entails more than just the stuff what you do or don't put in your mouth. Most vegans refrain from buying leather, silk or whool, as well as visiting events in which animals are used for entertainment purposes. Sometimes a separation between vegans and people that eat a plant-based diet is in place. The latter group only consumes a vegan diet because of health-related reasons and is not involved in the non-dietary side of veganism, such as animal welfare and/or environmentalism.

While vegetarians are quite accepted nowadays in society, vegans are often still seen as an odd and malnourished species. A kind of Neanderthal, but without the biceps.

Fairly unknown human species distantly related to Homo sapiens.

Homo herbivorus suffers from a chronic deficiency of protein. Species is likely to die within several years from now due to a lack of iron and vitamin B12.
Remarkably empathetic with and concerned about other living creatures and the planet as a whole.

- The Omnivore's Dictionary

If you think that with vegans you reached an end point in the food funnel, then think again. Veganism knows many movements and new ones come and go. There are many types of vegans out there. Some vegans change their diet regime often, or hop over to another movement because of curiosity. Trends and hypes play a big role in here.

Just Vegan (incl. Ethical and Environmental Vegans)

This is not an official name for this group, but I called it 'just vegan', since this will most likely be the response you get when you ask them what type of vegan they are. Many ethical and environmental vegans belong to this group, who became vegan for animal welfare and/or environmental motivations. While the ethical aspect of veganism plays a role in many vega movements, this is the main reason for 'just vegans', who care less about the health-related aspects of their diets. Oreo's and vegan junk food are mostly welcomed with open arms. Because of this, 'just vegans' are sometimes referred to as junk food vegans, but I find that name suggestive, as if every 'just vegan' only eats junk food.

* Whole Foods, Plant-based Vegan

The idea of whole foods, plant-based veganism is to consume as many 'whole' products and as little as possible from tins and packages with chemical additions to them. If I would have to jam myself into a vegan diet category, I would end up here I guess.

Raw vegans only eat raw, plant-based foods which are not heated above 45 degrees Celcius. Soaking nuts and seeds, and sprouting grains, legumes and rice are popular ways of preparing food in the raw cuisine. Other raw movements such as raw vegetarianism and raw foodism also exists: here you find raw fish, meat, eggs or dairy included in the diet, but these movements are less common than raw veganism.

Sounds exotic, but is rather straight forward, since it means exactly what it says: eating only raw food until 4 pm. People on the raw till 4 lifestyle mostly eat huge fruit meals for breakfast and lunch, and eat a lot of starch foods for dinner, along with a green salad.

High Carb Low Fat Vegan

Stortened as HCLF, this vegan movement means eating loads of carbohydrates and very little fats. The diet is usually followed by raw vegans. HCLF veganism is also known under the term 80/10/10 ("eighty-ten-ten"), what refers to the ratio of carbohydrates to fat and protein in your daily calorie count. Dr. Atkins would get a heart attack (hehe) if he heard about this, since the HCLF philosophy is exactly opposite to his low carb high fat-diet.

* The Starch Solution Vegan

Is a kind of HCLF (80/10/10) veganism, where the carbohydrates mainly come from starches such as potatoes, rice and oatmeal instead of fruit.

* Fruitarian

Another open door: a fruitarian eats just fruits and other foods that spontaneously fell from a tree, such as nuts and seeds. Motives for this diet vary from ethical to cultural to health and back again.

* Paleo Vegan / Pegan

The Paleo diet is a diet plan in which you eat like our ancestors from the Paleolithicum did, from 2,5 million to 10.000 years ago. The argument for the Paleo diet is, that we evolved on this food plan. For thousands of years, we ate like this, and our body adapted and specialised to it. At that time, the food was pure and unprocessed, and that is what you will eat if you follow the Paleo diet. Thing is: the original Paleo diet contains quite some meat, fish and eggs, and no legumes or grains (as they didn't eat those back then either). So as a Paleo vegan ( 'Pegan'), you got to do some homework before you start to make sure you get enough nutrients from your diet. In case Paleo veganism raised your interest, but you got scared back by the restrictions: no worries. Many Palego vegans do not strictly stick to the diet. They eat pure and without any refined or artificial additives, but do eat a bit of legumes and gluten fre grains like oats and rice.

* Gluten free Vegan

Eating plant-based without gluten - it's possible! Gluten are the protein you find in grains such as wheat, barley, rye, triticale, spelt, kamut, farro, durum, bulgur, semolina and couscous. Oats and oatmeal is naturally gluten free, but often 'cross-polluted' with gluten from other grains. Those who follow a strict gluten free diet should therefore buy oats that is explicitly labelled as 'gluten free'. For vegans with Coeliac Disease, eating gluten free is a no-brainer, but gluten free vegan food is an upcoming trend as well! Fine by me, as gluten intolerance seems to be no real. Especially modern wheat contains a lot of gluten, and many people don't do so well on this.

Gluten free substitutes: rice, buckwheat, quinoa, amaranth, corn, millet and (gluten free) oats.

One last thing: seitan is a no-go for gluten free vegans, as this is made from pure gluten!

* Low FODMAP Vegan

FODMAP stands for Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides And Polyols. These are carbohydrates that your body doesn't absorb so well. The carbs enter your small and large intestine, where bacteria fest on them, which produces gas. That gas can cause uncomfortable bloating and cramps. The FODMAP diet is made for people with IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), and it is said to alleve the symtoms of 75% of the people who follow the diet. Here you find a list of the foods you can and cannot eat on a low FODMAP diet. Scrolling through the list, you'll quickly arrive at the conclusion that it is pretty hard being a FODMAP vegan.

Freegans are people that do not buy food but live off what is left and thrown away by individuals and companies such as supermarkets. Often this is a reaction agains the consumer society. Many Freegans are vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian.

* Mono-islands

These are temporary vegan diet styles. If you follow a mono-island, then 7 to 21 days in a row you'll eat only the food item that grows on your little 'island', often supplemented with a handfull of leafy greens. Common mono-islands are Banana Islandand the Potato Cleanse. The idea behind mono-islands is that it soothes your digestive system because you only have to process one type of food.

What I think of Other Types of Vegans and Vegetarians

Many problems in this world arise and sustain because of some people judging other people that do not belong to their in-group. I do not really believe that the battle between vegetarians and pescetarians wil result in a nuclear war, but judgements, contempt and a lack of empathy do not make the lives of people and the world as a whole a better place. What if we stop judging each other as 'weak', 'naieve', 'speciecist' or 'extreme', but instead motivate each other to improve or just keep up the good work we already do? I think that in this way, we create happier people, a healthier Earth and less animal suffering than when we take each other down. And if I learned one thing from my Psychology study, it is that rewards are more effective then punishment.

So give a thumbs up for the hideous vegan creation your sister posted on Instagram, inform your flexitarian colleague about the vegan bargains at the supermarket, and compliment your omnivorous table companion for the vegetarian dish he ordered. Embrace all types of vegans and vegetarians and let us now eat hummus. Amen.

Sources:

De Groot, B. (2016). The Omnivore's Dictionary: Fictional descriptions of people adopting a plant-based lifestyle as believed by a significant number of members of the meat-consuming society. Breda, The Netherlands: The Leaf-green Press.

Photo credits: Puck Kroon

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Obesity is one of the most pressing health problems in the United States, and it will soon become the country's leading cause of preventable death. Despite the growing number of "diets" that are touted throughout the country, Americans just keep getting fatter. A government review of all the studies on weight loss found that two-thirds of dieters gain all the weight back within a year, and a whopping 97 percent gain it all back within five years. This yo-yo weight fluctuation is worse than being overweight; 97 percent of dieters would have been better off if they hadn't even bothered.

There has not been a single study indicating that high-protein diets such as Atkins work for more than a year. In fact, two studies showed that weight loss on the Atkins Diet reversed or stalled after just six months, and Atkins himself died weighing 258 pounds. The only weight-loss plan that has been scientifically proved to take weight off and keep it off for more than a year is a vegetarian diet. Many delicious vegan foods are naturally low in fat, so quantity and calorie restrictions are unnecessary. My colleague Dr. Dean Ornish calls it the "eat more, weigh less" diet (and even wrote a wonderful book with that title).

Animal products contain much more fat than plant-based foods. Because vegetarian diets are the only diets that work for long-term weight loss, it's no surprise that population studies show that meat-eaters have three times the obesity rate of vegetarians and nine times the obesity rate of vegans. It's possible to be an overweight or obese vegan, of course, just as it's possible to be a thin meat-eater, but adult vegans are, on average, 10 to 20 pounds lighter than adult meat-eaters.

Adopting a vegan diet won't just help you slim down, it will also help you fight an array of ailments, including heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer. Dr. T. Colin Campbell of Cornell University, arguably the foremost epidemiologist in the world, states, "Quite simply, the more you substitute plant foods for animal foods, the healthier you are likely to be. I now consider veganism to be the ideal diet. A vegan diet-particularly one that is low in fat-will substantially reduce disease risks. Plus, we've seen no disadvantages from veganism. In every respect, vegans appear to enjoy equal or better health in comparison to both vegetarians and non-vegetarians."

Order PETA's free vegetarian/vegan starter kit and start on the path to a healthier and slimmer you today.

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To get you started, check out our top vegan recipes, including easy vegan dishes, vegan family recipes and vegan desserts.

How does food affect greenhouse gases?

Your fridge might seem an unlikely setting for the fight against global warming, but did you know that food is responsible for a third of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions? What's more, meat and dairy make up nearly 60 per cent of that carbon footprint.

The UN says that global farmed livestock accounts for roughly 11 per cent of all manmade greenhouse gas emissions (with methane from cows a surprisingly big culprit). But according to new research published in the journal Climate, if we all went vegan, the world's food-related CO2 emissions may drop by 68 per cent within 15 years, The move, which the study's authors admit is hypothetical, would also provide the cut in emissions needed to limit global warming to 2ºC.

However, going vegan is not the only way to reduce food-related greenhouse gasses. Regenerative farming improves soil health on a farm by diversifying the types of crops grown and integrating them with animals. For example, a farmer could graze cows or sheep on a field for one year, making use of their natural fertiliser while also giving the soil a rest.

The Soil Association says healthy soil can capture and store more carbon than degraded soil; around two tonnes more carbon in every football pitch-sized patch of farmland. The idea is gaining popularity - in 2021, the UK government announced plans to subsidise farmers up to £70 per hectare if they adopt regenerative agriculture techniques.

So, going vegan may be better for the planet but there are other ways to tackle carbon emissions and global warming that don't mean cutting out meat and dairy.

Is a vegan diet healthy?

We know Western diets are linked to many health problems including heart disease, diabetes and obesity. In 2015, the World Health Organisation even categorised processed meat such as bacon as carcinogenic, along with asbestos, alcohol and arsenic. This might suggest that switching to a more plant-focused diet may be good for you as well as the planet.

An increasing amount of evidence shows the health benefits of eating more plant-focused foods, such as a reduced risk of dying from heart disease, fewer cases of type 2 diabetes and a lower risk of some cancers. A 2018 study by University of Oxford even concluded that switching to a plant-based diet could save up to eight million lives worldwide.

However, being vegan doesn't necessarily mean you're eating healthily. Some vegan products contain a lot of coconut oil, for example, which is high in saturated fat. The rise in vegan junk food, like burgers, 'fish' and chips, or sausage rolls, could also be fooling you into believing these foods are healthy. In fact, many are high in calories but lacking in essential nutrients, or are packed with salt and sugar.

Vegan diets may also miss out on vital vitamins and minerals, as they're naturally low in calcium, vitamin D, iron, vitamin B12, zinc and omega-3 fatty acids. If you are vegan, it's important to eat plenty of plant proteins from beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, and soya versions of 'milk' and yogurt to help boost your intake of those nutrients.

Peanuts are also a good vegan source of protein, while other nuts and seeds can provide minerals such as zinc and selenium - cashews, pistachios, flaxseeds, chia or pumpkin seeds are particularly valuable. Quinoa and buckwheat are often called pseudo-grains but are in fact seeds; quinoa is especially useful for vegans because it contains all of the 9 essential amino acids that we need for growth and repair.

It's easy to follow a balanced diet as a vegan but you need to be aware of what - and how much - you're eating: good advice for omnivores and herbivores alike.

Can going vegan reduce food shortages?

Would a vegan future make food poverty history? If it's about freeing up space and resources for growing food, there is some evidence to back this up.

A meat-eater's diet requires 17 times more land, 14 times more water and 10 times more energy than a vegetarian's, according to research published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. This is principally because we use a large proportion of the world's land for growing crops to feed livestock instead of humans - of the world's approximately five billion hectares of agricultural land, 77 per cent is used for livestock.

This squeeze on resources is only set to intensify. In 50 years, the UN predicts there will be 10.5 billion people on the planet (the current world population is around 8 billion). To feed us all, we need to grow food more sustainably.

One of the counterarguments against this vegan solution is that some grazing land isn't suitable for growing crops. That's certainly true, but there's actually a bigger problem with eradicating world hunger. Right now, we already produce enough calories to comfortably feed everyone on the planet, but more than 820 million people may still not get enough food.

In other words, having enough to eat is as much about politics and big business as it is about dietary choices, so there's nothing to say that hunger would be a thing of the past in a vegan world.

Where would all the animals go?

If we no longer bred farm animals, what would happen? Would they become extinct? Would they overrun the planet?
Billions of farm animals would no longer be destined for our dinner plates and if we couldn't return them to the wild, they might be slaughtered, abandoned, or taken care of in sanctuaries. Or, more realistically, farmers might slow down breeding as demand for meat falls.

Farm animals are bred far more intensively than they reproduce in the wild. As with all wildlife, any returned animal populations would fluctuate and eventually reach a balance, depending on predators and available resources in the wild.

It's worth noting that not all livestock could simply 'go free'. Some farm breeds, such as broiler chickens, are now so far removed from their ancestors that they couldn't survive in the wild. Others, like pigs and sheep, could feasibly return to woodlands and grazing pastures, and find their own natural population levels.

On top of that, even if we stopped eating animals, our ongoing destruction of wild habitats would still reduce their numbers. As always with nature, it's a question of balance.

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Is a vegan diet better for the environment? For more on vegan diets, we've collaborated with BBC Future - read the BBC Future guide to the health benefits of going vegan. Paul Allen is author of The Ethical Careers Guide and founder of creative agency Lark. All health content on bbcgoodfood.com is provided for general information only, and should not be treated as a substitute for the medical advice of your own doctor or any other health care professional. If you have any concerns about your general health, you should contact your local health care provider. See our website terms and conditions for more information.
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When the world's vegetarians find themselves the subject of dinner-table cross-examinations after turning down a helping of grandma's chicken, they have plenty of arguments for not eating meat at their disposal. Many of these are well known, such as the desire to reduce animal suffering, benefit the environment, or lead a healthier life.

Add to that list an economic case. In a study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marco Springmann and his colleagues at the University of Oxford conservatively estimate that if people continue to follow current trends of meat consumption, rather than shifting to a more balanced or plant-based diet, it could cost the U.S. between $197 billion and $289 billion each year-and the global economy up to $1.6 trillion-by 2050.

"It's always hard to really get your head around what it means if you avoid climate change to [a certain] degree, or have one less person dying from diet-related diseases," said Springmann, a postdoctoral researcher with The Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food. "We wanted to illustrate the scale of those benefits."

Springmann and his team imagined several potential dietary scenarios in 2050, comparing health-care and climate-related costs if the world keeps up its current meat-heavy diet, versus shifting to a diet that meets standard global dietary guidelines. For many regions of the world, this shift would mean drastically cutting meat consumption and eating more fruits and vegetables. Springmann also calculated the hypothetical costs of a world of vegetarians (a diet with no meat), and vegans (no eggs, dairy, or animal products whatsoever).

The researchers calculated the direct health-care costs of a meat-heavy diet (associated with the treatment of diseases such as diabetes or heart disease) and indirect costs resulting from unpaid care from family or friends, and lost work days. To quantify the savings of reducing meat-related greenhouse-gas emissions, they drew on a measurement called " social cost of carbon," which estimates the value of future damages caused by each additional ton of carbon emissions.

Out of all the world's countries, the U.S. would save the most by curbing its taste for meat. Due to its very high per-capita health-care costs, the country could save $180 billion if the population ate according to recommended guidelines, and $250 billion if it eschewed animal food products altogether-more than China, or all of the EU countries combined. And this is to say nothing of the number of obesity- and chronic-disease-related deaths that could be averted (at least 320,000 per year), and the accompanying benefits of reducing the level of greenhouse-gas emissions. (Springmann and his team made another estimate, using a somewhat less intuitive measure called "value of a statistical life," that put the savings from not eating meat in the neighborhood of $2 trillion to $3 trillion in the U.S., and $20 trillion to $30 trillion worldwide.)

Overall, the researchers pointed out that the economic value of health benefits associated with more plant-based diets is comparable with, or exceeds, the value of the environmental benefits.

The authors admit, of course, that the valuation techniques they used are "subject to significant uncertainties." And achieving the kind of savings they identify would require a massive overhaul of dietary patterns across the globe-the world's population would need to reduce red-meat consumption by 56 percent, increase fruit and vegetable consumption by 25 percent, and simply consume 15 percent fewer calories overall.

But putting a dollar value on these already well-established impacts is significant: For one, these figures can guide policy. Countries could compare these health and environmental costs when considering the implementation of programs to reduce red-meat consumption or increase fruit and vegetable consumption, Springmann said. The dollar figures could also be used to analyze potential policies, such as new taxes or changes to the regulation of food advertising.

"What lots of health research has shown is that although individuals can obviously make a difference, it's not terribly efficient to appeal only to the individual without changes in the framework," said Springmann. "What really works [are] population-based approaches that affect the whole food environment."

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Monique Koch, a vegan family coach who is also known as the Brown Vegan on YouTube, leading a cooking class at the fourth annual Baltimore Vegan SoulFest in August. The festival attracts more than 8,000 people each year. Credit... Nate Pesce for The New York Times

Aph Ko got tired of hearing that eating vegan was something only white people did. So in 2015, she created a list of 100 black vegans for a website. It included pioneering figures like Dick Gregory and Coretta Scott King and younger, less famous writers, filmmakers, cooks and activists.

"When you say 'vegan,' a lot of people tend to only think of PETA, which doesn't reflect the massive landscape of vegan activism," said Ms. Ko, 28, a Floridian whose favorite dish at the moment is the spinach pie in " The Vegan Stoner Cookbook. " "The black vegan movement is one of the most diverse, decolonial, complex and creative movements."

So many other people wanted to be included on the list after it appeared, she started a website, Black Vegans Rock. That spawned a Twitter hashtag (#blackvegansrock) and a T-shirt business. In June, she published "Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters," a book she wrote with her older sister, Syl Ko.

Vegan cooking and eating are having a renaissance among black Americans, driven in part by movements like Black Lives Matter, documentaries like "What the Health," and a growing cadre of people who connect personal health, animal welfare and social justice with the fight for racial equality. Athletes like Kyrie Irving of the Boston Celtics and pop stars like the singer Jhené Aiko are bringing a certain pop culture cachet. Cookbook authors and a new breed of vegan soul food restaurants offer culinary muscle.

"I no longer feel like an endangered species out here," said Zachary Toliver, 26, a writer in Tacoma, Wash., who was on the 100 Black Vegans list and is now a columnist for PETA, the animal rights group, where he writes articles like "Here Are 11 Things You Can Expect to Happen if You're Vegan While Black." (No. 1: "You're still just as nervous about whether or not your white friends properly seasoned the food.")

Like many food trends that seem new, black veganism has historical roots. Eating vegan has long been a practice, especially for followers of religious and spiritual movements like Rastafarianism and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, a religious group with black nationalist underpinnings that rose up in the 1960s and still runs a chain of vegan restaurants in cities like Atlanta; Tallahassee, Fla., and Tel Aviv.

Avoiding meat is also a core principle of the Nation of Islam, whose founders believed that pork was at the heart of the slave diet, and preached vegetarianism as the most healthful diet for African-Americans.

Many people who give up eating animal products do it for their health, or for animal welfare. The same is true for the new veganism among African-Americans, but there is an added layer of another kind of politics.

"It's not just about I want to eat well so I can live long and be skinny," said Jenné Claiborne, a personal chef and cooking teacher who recently moved to Los Angeles from New York. Her first cookbook, "Sweet Potato Soul," is due out in February. "For a lot of black people, it's also the social justice and food access. The food we have been eating for decades and decades and has been killing us."

Ms. Claiborne, 30, is part of a new generation of vegan cooks who are transforming traditional soul food dishes, digging deeper into the West African roots of Southern cooking and infusing new recipes with the tastes of the Caribbean.

As a result, ideas about the dull vegan stews and stir-fries that were standard-bearers among the early generations of black vegan cooks are changing - albeit slowly.

"Some folks are kind of stuck in the '70s," said Jessica B. Harris, 69, an author and a food scholar of the African diaspora. "Their food seems to come with a dashiki. And don't tell me it's like fried chicken when it's tofu."

Bryant Terry cooks to counter the old ideas about vegan food. The chef-in-residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Mr. Terry, 43, wrote "Afro-Vegan: Farm-Fresh African, Caribbean and Southern Flavors Remixed," a 2014 cookbook that regularly makes it to the top 10 soul food cookbook rankings on Amazon.

His recipe for millet cakes is bright with the brick-red Ethiopian spice blend berbere. He likes to serve it with a sauce built from roasted green peppers, garlic and cilantro, and infused with heat from jalapeños.

"In some ways, it's a quiet wink to the '70s-style macrobiotic veggie burgers," he said. But it pales in comparison to what a new batch of black vegan cooks are doing. "I cook like someone's grandma," he added. "What I'm really excited about are some of the younger chefs who are professionally trained and know how to put food together in a new way."

One of them is Ms. Claiborne, who grew up in suburban Atlanta and moved to New York after college to pursue an acting career. Her father was raised vegan, according to Hebrew Israelite beliefs, and still eats that way 90 percent of the time, she said. She grew up eating everything but red meat, and learned to cook soul food at her grandmother's side.

Ms. Claiborne wasn't a vegan when she started a food blog in 2010 as a way to pass the time between auditions. That came a year later, when she got a job at Peacefood Cafe in Manhattan. Now she dedicates herself to countering the notion that soul food has to include meat, and that childhood classics need milk or butter.

She adds butternut squash to sweet potato pie to create the texture usually contributed by eggs. Oyster mushrooms stand in for shrimp in Creole étouffée. She puts jackfruit in her jambalaya and cooks down collard greens with soy sauce and smoked paprika instead of pork.

Health is often not enough of a reason for people to give up meat, she said. The challenges that come with being black in America can be. "When it's bigger than you, and it's political and it's spiritual, that is an entrance point for people," she said.

The toughest cultural touchstone to let go of is fried chicken, she said. "People tell me: 'I can't do without the chicken. I'd rather die a painful death than have to give up chicken,'" she said. To help, she created spicy chicken-fried cauliflower, in which she builds a crunchy crust by dipping large florets into heavily seasoned flour and then a wet batter of hot sauce, Dijon mustard and soy milk.

Popular culture is also shining a new light on black veganism and bringing more converts. Some trace the boost to the late 2000s, when two key books were published: Amie Breeze Harper's anthology titled "Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society" and Tracye McQuirte's "By Any Greens Necessary: A Revolutionary Guide for Black Women Who Want to Eat Great, Get Healthy, Lose Weight, and Look Phat."

Then came Oprah Winfrey, who challenged her staff to go vegan for a week in 2011 and built a show around it. In 2015, Jay Z and Beyoncé became partners in a vegan meal kit service.

Celebrities continue to join in. Laverne Cox and Danielle Brooks, stars of "Orange is the New Black," said recently that they were going vegan. And in the current season of "The Real Housewives of Atlanta," a cast member, Porsha Williams, announced she was a "baby vegan."

African-American sports stars have embraced vegan diets as a way to improve their performance. Serena and Venus Williams say they try to eat vegan most of the time. The former N.F.L. linebacker David Carter (nicknamed the 300-Pound Vegan) stopped eating animal products a few years ago.

In an article this month in The Bleacher Report, Kip Andersen, the director of the documentary "What the Health," was quoted as saying that so many professional basketball players had given up meat that the league might soon be called the N.V.A. - the National Vegan Association.

Hip-hop artists have embraced veganism as part of a larger effort to improve the health of their fans. Last year, the Atlanta based rapper who goes by the name Grey had a minor internet hit with a vegan Thanksgiving rap. And in April, several vegan-friendly performers gathered at the Schomburg Center in Harlem to formally introduce health and wellness as " the 10th element of hip-hop." (Although there is some debate over what that list should be, the other nine on that list are breaking, M.C.'ing, graffiti art, D.J.-ing, beatboxing, street fashion, language, knowledge and entrepreneurialism.)

The event was part of Hip Hop Is Green, a health initiative started by Keith Tucker of Seattle that produces dinners and concerts that promote plant-based eating.

Tassili Ma'at, 60, owns Tassili's Raw Reality in the historic West End of Atlanta. She raised her youngest two children as vegans, and now eats only raw food. She's a member of the Atlanta chapter of Hip Hop Is Green, which she says is a way to help young people identify veganism as both "something cool and something political."

"I acknowledge my customers for being modern-day revolutionaries without picking up a gun or having to throw a grenade or pick up a picket sign and carry it down the street," she said. "We are defying the death industry."

Then again, sometimes it's just about eating something delicious and having fun. To that end, cooks in several cities have begun hosting black-focused vegan food festivals and "mac downs," where hundreds of people compete in vegan mac-and-cheese competitions.

In Baltimore last August, the Vegan SoulFest attracted nearly 10,000 people, said Naijha Wright-Brown, 45, who opened the vegan soul food bistro The Land of Kush in 2011 with her husband, Greg Brown, and owns five "Black Vegans Rock" T-shirts.

Theirs is one of dozens of new black-owned vegan restaurants that have popped up recently in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit and New York.

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Black Vegans Step Out, for Their Health and Other Causes

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Aph Ko got tired of hearing that eating vegan was something only white people did. So in 2015, she created a list of 100 black vegans for a website. It included pioneering figures like Dick Gregory and Coretta Scott King and younger, less famous writers, filmmakers, cooks and activists.

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Veganism is a lifestyle, which has been around forever, but is only recently increasing in popularity. It involves the elimination of all animal products, including meat, eggs, and dairy, from the diet. Many people are turning to veganism to lose weight, to save animals, and to live a healthier life. If done right, veganism can fulfill all of these goals. However, there are some downsides to this fad diet.

#1 - Carbohydrate Overload

One of the biggest issues with veganism is that all those calories you used to eat in buffalo wings, hamburgers, ice cream, and omelets tend to be replaced with bread and processed snacks. Many vegans binge on carbohydrates especially when it comes to pasta, bread, cereal, pastries, and rice. If you do choose to become a vegan, the empty space in your diet should be filled primarily with whole organic foods with lots of fruits and vegetables rather than processed foods and breads.

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Veganism is a lifestyle, which has been around forever, but is only recently increasing in popularity. It involves the elimination of all animal products, including meat, eggs, and dairy, from the diet. Many people are turning to veganism to lose weight, to save animals, and to live a healthier life.

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11. Sugar wrecks your face

Sugar in your bloodstream attaches to proteins to form harmful new molecules called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. These unwanted invaders attack nearby proteins, damaging them, including protein fibers in collagen and elastin, the components that keep your skin firm and elastic. The result of too much sugar? Dry, brittle protein fibers that lead to wrinkles and saggy skin.

There's more! AGEs promote the growth of fragile collagen and deactivate your body's natural antioxidant enzymes. This opens the door to more sun damage, which, as we all know, also damages and ages your skin.

Sugar Smart Tip: Beware of natural sweeteners, too. Agave products boast a higher fructose content than high-fructose corn syrup. For a sweet treat, use up to a teaspoon of honey no more than once a day.

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11 Weird Things Sugar's Doing To Your Body

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11. Sugar wrecks your face Sugar in your bloodstream attaches to proteins to form harmful new molecules called advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. These unwanted invaders attack nearby proteins, damaging them, including protein fibers in collagen and elastin, the components that keep your skin firm and elastic.

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Of all the nutrients that vegans must think about, calcium probably demands the most effort. Sure, other nutrients require attention too, but most are quite easy to obtain. For instance, your needs for Vitamins D and B₁₂ are easily covered by popping supplements every two or three days. As for protein, a variety of vegan foods are loaded with it, plus you can always turn to vegan protein powder should you fall short. Omega 3 needs can be met with a daily tablespoon of ground chia, plus a capsule or two of vegan DHA/EPA.

Meeting your calcium needs requires greater attention. That's because many foods contain virtually no calcium, and most people don't supplement for this nutrient. Supplementing is therefore frequently a wise choice, both for vegans and non-vegans.

Dairy Industry Duplicity

Sometimes people on both sides of an argument get their main points spectacularly wrong. That's especially true in the calcium dispute that rages dairy interests and vegans. The dairy people seem at times deliberately misleading, whereas the vegans also trot out their share of bogus claims.

Using the classic "get 'em while they're young" strategy, the dairy industry has put calcium needs for growing children and adolescents at the very center of their marketing. By using the "calcium, calcium, calcium" mantra, and holding up milk as a uniquely good source of this nutrient, they've created the impression that dairy products are by far the best source of calcium. But, as we'll discover when we review the calcium content of various vegan foods, that claim just isn't true.

On top of this, the dairy marketing boards never seem to volunteer the fact that the vast majority of people have problems digesting milk. About 65 percent of the world's adults are lactose intolerant. And that figure is much higher among people of African and Asian descent-around 99 percent of adults of Chinese descent are lactose intolerant.

Calcium for Vegans: Setting the Record Straight

Unfortunately, vegan advocates are scarcely better than dairy lobbyists when it comes to accurately discussing calcium. A number of vegan books and websites assert that dairy is, in reality, a poor source of calcium. The claim is that the substantial amount of protein found in dairy products inhibits calcium absorption. Often, this argument is accompanied by charts showing the rates of hip fracture in various countries, making it appear that dairy consumption increases rates of hip fracture.

This entire line of thinking has, however, been thoroughly debunked. It turns out that high protein intake doesn't probably doesn't have much impact on bone health. In fact, protein has also been shown to improve calcium absorption. As for the hip fracture argument, there are confounding factors that make pointing to this statistic dishonest. For example, hip fracture rates are highest in high-latitude locations with lots of ice on streets and sidewalks-and ice is of course closely associated with falls. On top of that, these high latitude areas tend to mean people have lower vitamin D status, which results in diminished bone health.

As we're about to see, it's nonsense to assert that dairy plays an irreplaceable role in ensuring adequate calcium consumption. But the position some vegans take regarding calcium is equally problematic. The reality is that it's quite possible for a daily milk drinker to see her calcium status decline by going vegan. This is especially likely if she doesn't make the effort to add calcium-rich vegan foods to replace the dairy products she has stopped consuming.

How Do Vegans Get Calcium?

As with every other nutrient, there's no hard and fast intake number that applies to everyone. Absorption rates differ from person to person. Setting the target level for any nutrient is an inexact science, but an informed guess is obviously more helpful than no guess at all. So when governments and nutritional councils set targets they try to err on the high side. Their intention is to ensure that the guideline will meet the needs of upwards of 95 percent of the population.

Optimum calcium consumption varies at different ages, being highest during teen years and old age. The Institute of Medicine in the United States sets recommendations for calcium at 1300 mg. for people age nine to eighteen, 1000 mg for adults, and 1200 mg. for women over fifty and men over seventy. These numbers are probably not exactly right, but they're the best estimate we've got. It's therefore wise to plan your diet so that you can hit these recommendations.

Vegan Calcium Sources

Now that we know that you need something like 1000 to 1300 milligrams of calcium each day, reaching this number involves simple arithmetic. Here is what various calcium-rich vegan foods deliver:

Tofu (½ Cup or 4.5 ounces. Must have calcium sulfate listed in the ingredients): 430 mg (90 Calories)

Soy Milk (1 Cup, calcium-fortified, unsweetened): 300 mg. (79 Calories)

Collard greens (1 Cup, cooked): 268 mg. (63 Calories)

Mustard greens (1 Cup, cooked): 165 mg. (36 Calories)

Bok-Choy (1 Cup, cooked) 158 mg. (20 Calories)

Kale (1 Cup, chopped, cooked): 94 mg. (36 Calories)

Black Beans (1 Cup, canned) 84 mg. (218 Calories)

Tahini (1 Tablespoon, roasted): 64 mg. (89 Calories)

Broccoli (1 Cup, chopped, cooked): 31 mg. (27 Calories)

For comparison, whole milk supplies 276 mg. calcium per cup, and contains 149 calories. So you can see that cow's milk is an excellent source of calcium, but fortified soy milk is too. And on a per-calorie basis, bok-choy contains more than four times the calcium as whole cow's milk.

Meeting Your Calcium Needs as a Vegan

The calcium figures above are useful to keep in mind, but they're also a lot to have to remember. With many calcium-rich vegan foods, the limiting factor of how much you'd want to eat in a day isn't related to calorie content, but instead to how bulky these foods are.

For instance, kale contains a great deal of calcium per calorie. The trouble is that this calcium is accompanied by a whole lot of bulk. If you tried to meet your daily calcium needs solely through cooked kale, you'd have to eat ten cups a day. You'd have to be deranged to attempt that! Even worse would be the prospect of trying to meet your needs through black beans alone. Just imagine what eating more than ten cups of beans every day would do to you.

Tofu and Soy Milk Can Contain Loads of Calcium

There's no question that you could get sufficient calcium by eating some combination of beans, greens, and broccoli. But your diet would be on the strange side, and would be bulkier than many people prefer. That's why the addition of some calcium-fortified soy milk or some calcium-set tofu can make all the difference (Always make sure that your tofu lists calcium sulfate in its ingredients, otherwise it's not a good source of calcium.)

Together, tofu and vegan milks can transform the task of getting sufficient calcium from tricky to easy. For example, just by drinking a cup of soy milk with breakfast, and then including a half-cup of tofu as part of your lunch, you've already met half your daily calcium needs. From there, you need only eat a relatively small amount of beans and greens to put yourself over the top.

Some people object that eating calcium-set tofu and fortified soy milk isn't "natural," but this is a baseless concern. Such calcium is as well-absorbed and high quality as the calcium from any other source.

Oxalates

Every sort of leafy green contains a substantial amount of calcium. But there's an important caveat to keep in mind: several popular greens contain substantial amounts of oxalates (oxalic acid). This substance interferes with calcium absorption. Oxalates won't cancel out all the calcium your greens contain, but they can prevent you from absorbing most of it.

So if you're eating greens in order to boost your calcium intake, you should avoid spinach, chard, and rhubarb-all of which are rich in oxalates. Note also that boiling oxalate-rich greens causes some of the oxalic acid to leach out into the water. This significantly improves calcium absorption, assuming you discard the cooking water and don't use it as soup stock.

The greens mentioned in the previous section-collard greens, mustard greens, bok-choy, and kale-are all low in oxalates, and are therefore superb sources of calcium.

Vegan Calcium Supplements

Some people have trouble getting sufficient calcium through food alone. In these cases, supplements offer an easy way to close the gap. Depending on the brand (check the label), just one tablet can give you a whopping 500 to 1000 mg. of this nutrient, enabling you to easily elevate your intake from inadequate to excellent. Deva Nutrition manufactures an affordable vegan supplement that contains a big dose of both calcium and magnesium.

But don't just start gobbling supplements without paying heed to your total calcium intake. Too much calcium can easily lead to kidney stones (which are dangerous and excruciating to pass). So make sure that your combined calcium intake from food and supplements doesn't exceed 1300 milligrams per day.

Bone Health for Vegans

Articles about bone health tend to focus on calcium consumption, but there are two more important factors to consider: vitamin D and exercise.

Bones contain specialized cells called osteoblasts and osteoclasts, which work together to maintain bone strength and prevent brittleness. Just like you need a steady flow of oxygen entering your bloodstream, the same is true of the minerals that enter and leave your bones. Every day, a tiny portion of your skeleton is broken down by osteoclasts. As this is accomplished, osteoblasts then take calcium from your blood and assemble it into a fresh new bone matrix. Increasing the number and function of your osteoblasts strengthens your bones and makes them less prone to breakage.

As you can see, calcium intake is only part of the story where bone health is concerned. So be sure you're taking in adequate vitamin D. This nutrient is essential for proper osteoclast formation, a vital component in bone health.

The Importance of Exercise

Regular weight-bearing exercise also strengthens bones by improving the performance of osteoblasts and osteoclasts. Weight lifting of any kind obviously qualifies as weight-bearing exercise. That's true whether you're doing 200 kilogram bench presses or toying around with 1 kilogram dumbbells.

Not into weights? Cheap portable resistance bands deliver the same bone health benefits as weight training. There are numerous other types of weight bearing exercise. These include: walking, hiking, jogging, climbing stairs, tennis, and dancing.

The two most popular exercises that are not considered weight-bearing are swimming and bicycling. While these can work wonders in terms of aerobic conditioning, they are unlikely to improve bone health.

If the connection between exercise and bone health interests you, check out our Guide to Vegan Fitness. You'll discover that how easy it is to get more physically active, and unlock substantial benefits.

Three Crucial Takeaways

If you don't drink cow's milk and you never give calcium a thought, you're likely to suffer poor bone health later in life. But you can easily reduce these risks, since it's easy for vegans to boost bone health. The three core recommendations are:

1. Get your 1000 to 1300 milligrams of calcium each day. If you can't get all of this through food, then take a supplement but be sure not to surpass 1300 milligrams total (food plus supplement) calcium consumption per day.

2. Spend a half hour or more each day doing some type of weight-bearing exercise.

3. Make sure you're getting adequate vitamin D. For most vegans, especially those in temperate climates, that means taking a vitamin D supplement.

Vegans and omnivores alike often pay insufficient attention to calcium intake, a fact reflected by the millions of bone fractures occurring due to osteoporosis each year. Fortunately, a well-planned vegan diet coupled with adequate exercise can ensure excellent calcium status today, and good bone health later in life.

***

For further reading: " Protecting Bone Health on a Vegan Diet," by Virginia Messina, MPH, RD.

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Vegan Calcium Sources: An Overview - Vegan.com

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Of all the nutrients that vegans must think about, calcium probably demands the most effort. Sure, other nutrients require attention too, but most are quite easy to obtain. For instance, your needs for Vitamins D and B12 are easily covered by popping supplements every two or three days.

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Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.

The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% - an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined - and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.

The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority - 83% - of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

The study, published in the journal Science, created a huge dataset based on almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification).

"A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use," said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. "It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car," he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems," he said. "Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy."

The analysis also revealed a huge variability between different ways of producing the same food. For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land result in 12 times more greenhouse gases and use 50 times more land than those grazing rich natural pasture. But the comparison of beef with plant protein such as peas is stark, with even the lowest impact beef responsible for six times more greenhouse gases and 36 times more land.

Greenhouse gas emissions for meat, dairy and pulses

The large variability in environmental impact from different farms does present an opportunity for reducing the harm, Poore said, without needing the global population to become vegan. If the most harmful half of meat and dairy production was replaced by plant-based food, this still delivers about two-thirds of the benefits of getting rid of all meat and dairy production.

Cutting the environmental impact of farming is not easy, Poore warned: "There are over 570m farms all of which need slightly different ways to reduce their impact. It is an [environmental] challenge like no other sector of the economy." But he said at least $500bn is spent every year on agricultural subsidies, and probably much more: "There is a lot of money there to do something really good with."

Labels that reveal the impact of products would be a good start, so consumers could choose the least damaging options, he said, but subsidies for sustainable and healthy foods and taxes on meat and dairy will probably also be necessary.

One surprise from the work was the large impact of freshwater fish farming, which provides two-thirds of such fish in Asia and 96% in Europe, and was thought to be relatively environmentally friendly. "You get all these fish depositing excreta and unconsumed feed down to the bottom of the pond, where there is barely any oxygen, making it the perfect environment for methane production," a potent greenhouse gas, Poore said.

The research also found grass-fed beef, thought to be relatively low impact, was still responsible for much higher impacts than plant-based food. "Converting grass into [meat] is like converting coal to energy. It comes with an immense cost in emissions," Poore said.

The new research has received strong praise from other food experts. Prof Gidon Eshel, at Bard College, US, said: "I was awestruck. It is really important, sound, ambitious, revealing and beautifully done."

He said previous work on quantifying farming's impacts, including his own, had taken a top-down approach using national level data, but the new work used a bottom-up approach, with farm-by-farm data. "It is very reassuring to see they yield essentially the same results. But the new work has very many important details that are profoundly revealing."

Prof Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, UK, said: "This is an immensely useful study. It brings together a huge amount of data and that makes its conclusions much more robust. The way we produce food, consume and waste food is unsustainable from a planetary perspective. Given the global obesity crisis, changing diets - eating less livestock produce and more vegetables and fruit - has the potential to make both us and the planet healthier."

Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was also impressed but noted: "There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption."

Poore said: "The reason I started this project was to understand if there were sustainable animal producers out there. But I have stopped consuming animal products over the last four years of this project. These impacts are not necessary to sustain our current way of life. The question is how much can we reduce them and the answer is a lot."

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Avoiding meat and dairy is 'single biggest way' to reduce your impact on Earth

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Biggest analysis to date reveals huge footprint of livestock - it provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland

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Vegan News, Plant Based Living, Food, Health & more

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© 2019 Plant Based News LTD, a global, multi-platform and award winning news, media and entertainment company. The go-to source for vegan news, plant-based culture and educational health content for its dedicated audience around the globe. Plant Based News Ltd, PO Box 71173, London, SE20 9DQ. Registered in England.

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The Best Argument Against Veganism | Gary Yourofsky

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VEGANS vs MEAT EATERS - Who Will Live Longer? Food / Diet Comparison

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Start studying Veganism. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

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A Part of Conversation Questions for the ESL Classroom.

Related: Restaurants, Fruits and Vegetables, Diets, Food & Eating

Do you know any vegetarians?

Do you think restaurants should offer one or two vegetarian dishes on their menu?

What are the different kinds of vegetarians?

Could you try vegetarianism for a month?

Could you try vegetarianism for a week?

Could you try vegetarianism for a full day?

If someone eats cheese and drinks milk, are they vegetarian?

If someone wears leather shoes or a fur coat, can they call themselves "vegetarian"?

What is the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian?

What is the most logical reason for becoming a vegetarian?

What would you prepare for a vegetarian coming for dinner at your home? (appetizer, main dish, dessert and beverage)

What meal would you miss the most if you became vegetarian?

What would be a great meal you would prepare for yourself as a vegetarian?

Would you go to a vegetarian restaurant for dinner?

What would be more difficult to eat, a strange new vegetable, or an exotic piece of meat?

What are the proven benefits of eating meat?

Have you ever considered becoming a vegetarian?

Would you marry a vegetarian if it meant you could not cook meat at home?

Do you know any famous vegetarians? (Albert Einstein, Avril Lavigne, Buddha, Clint Eastwood)

What is a better reason for becoming a vegetarian; health reasons or animal rights?

If you can think of another good question for this list, please add it. http://iteslj.org/questions/
Thanks to Sarah Mulvey who suggested this topic and contributed the first 20 questions in November 2011.
Copyright © 1997-2010 by The Internet TESL Journal

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esl efl esol tesl tefl tesol elt english as a second language english as a foreign language

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ESL Conversation Questions - Vegetarian (I-TESL-J)

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A Part of Conversation Questions for the ESL Classroom. Related: Restaurants, Fruits and Vegetables, Diets, Food & Eating Do you know any vegetarians? Do you think restaurants should offer one or two vegetarian dishes on their menu? What are the different kinds of vegetarians? Could you try vegetarianism for a month?

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Try the online quiz, reading, listening, and activities on grammar, spelling and vocabulary for this lesson on World Vegetarian Day. Click on the links above or see the activities below this article:

Your browser does not support this audio player.

READ

World Vegetarian Day is held every year on October the 1st. It was started in the USA by the North American Vegetarian Society (NAVS). Many countries have similar celebrations held on different days. They all celebrate the benefits of eating a plant-based diet. In 1977, the NAVS said it wanted to "promote the joy, compassion and life-enhancing possibilities of vegetarianism." It hoped to raise awareness of the ethical, environmental, health and humanitarian benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle. The number of people turning to vegetarianism is increasing every year. There are about one million new vegetarians in the United States every year. October 1st sees many of them celebrate their food and eat lots of it.

Vegetarianism is when you follow a diet that excludes meat, fish, shellfish, and other animal products. There are several different types of vegetarian. A vegan will not eat meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, eggs, honey or anything else from or made by animals. Most vegetarians eat and drink dairy products and eat eggs. These are called lacto-ovo vegetarians. 'Lacto' is the Latin word for milk and 'ovo' means egg. Other people say they are vegetarian but they eat fish. Many people are vegetarian for ethical, health, and/or religious reasons. Scientists say we must all be vegetarian to help save the Earth. There is not enough land for us all to be carnivores, or meat-eaters.

Sources: http://www.wikipedia.org/ and assorted sites.

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Try the online quiz, reading, listening, and activities on grammar, spelling and vocabulary for this lesson on World Vegetarian Day. Click on the links above or see the activities below this article: Your browser does not support this audio player. World Vegetarian Day is held every year on October the 1st.

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Teaching Youth About Veganism -- The Vegetarian Resource Group

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Vegetarian nutrition information, recipes, books, and publishers of Vegetarian Journal. The Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public on vegetarianism and the interrelated issues of health, nutrition, ecology, ethics, and world hunger. In addition to publishing the Vegetarian Journal, VRG produces and sells cookbooks, other books, pamphlets, and article reprints.

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How important is meat in your diet? Could you happily live without ever eating any meat? In the UK vegetarianism is becoming more and more popular.

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There is one downside to being vegan: non-vegans ask you the same questions over and over again. Here at Viva! we've compiled our own list of the Top 20 questions and comments that people make about veganism. If you're thinking about becoming vegan, you may find the answer to something that's troubling you here. (If you're in a hurry, Hitler is at No. 14).

1a. If we all went vegan, we'd be overrun with animals?

Farmed animals are not allowed to reproduce naturally and farmers only breed animals when they can make a profit out of doing so. As demand for meat goes down over time, so fewer and fewer animals will be bred. That means that we will not be overrun by millions of farmed animals, as some people seem to imagine. Eventually, the few that are left can be allowed to go free: pigs can root around in woodlands as it is natural for them to do, sheep will graze the hillsides like deer and so on. Their populations will find their own natural levels, just like every other animal.

1b. If we all went vegan - all the animals would die out.

The converse of the above question - we vegans hear 'em all! It's true that the number of animals will fall as farmers breed fewer and fewer animals as the years go by. Farmed animals live a controlled, distorted life, often filled with pain and fear. The vast majority of farmed animals are kept in indoor units where they never see the light of day. Those that are kept outside are only kept alive for a fraction of their natural lifespans before being slaughtered for meat - often in the most barbaric manner imaginable. All farmed animals are born to die at our command - a disgusting idea. Also some breeds have been so changed from their natural ancestor that it would be kinder to let them die out. For example, broiler chickens and turkeys bred for meat are often so obese that they can barely walk and suffer from crippling leg disorders. However we could set up large nature reserves for the more traditional (now rare) breeds that haven't been so changed.

There would be much more land available for reserves because most of it is used to grow crops for fattening animals at present. Also, there would be more space for forests and woods and other wildlife reservations where genuinely wild British species of animal and plants could flourish. In other countries we could encourage the breeding of our farm animal's wild ancestors - the wild pig, turkeys and jungle fowl (the forerunner of the battery hen) by stopping the destruction of their homes.

Many people forget that all farmed animals have been bred from wild animals - and that their natural ancestors need preserving.

In a vegan world animals would not be kept for profit and greed but would be allowed to exist in their natural state and live their life in freedom.

2. Our teeth/digestive systems are designed for eating meat.

No, they aren't. We can digest meat, but our digestive systems are different to carnivorous animals: our guts are longer (so we can digest lots of plant materials) and our teeth are not designed to slice and tear flesh. Our teeth and mouths are the wrong shape to be able to kill and hold captive struggling prey (compare our jaw shape and teeth to a lion - or your pet cat or dog!). That's why humans cook meat before eating it and why we're no good at crunching and munching uncooked bones. As for our sharp teeth, gorillas are entirely vegan - as are almost all primates - and yet have far longer and sharper canine teeth than human beings. The diet of the ancestors of human beings was vegan until they began hunting about one-and-a-half million years ago but even then meat formed just a tiny part of their diet. That's why people live long, healthy lives on vegan diets but would quickly die if they ate nothing but meat.

To find out more, see our Nutrition Myths page or read our guides, Wheat Eaters or Meat Eaters and Your Health in Your Hands.

3. Eating meat is natural.

As we've just seen, it isn't. Humans have only eaten meat in relatively recent evolutionary history and then only through the use of tools like spears and fire. Only when we started farming (hardly natural!) did meat become even a regular part of most human beings' diets and eating meat on a daily basis is very recent - since the advent of factory farming after the Second World War. This brought the cost of rearing animals down and the meat eating explosion was the result. In 1946, for example, the number of poultry eaten in Britain was 31.9 million and in 2001 it was over 800 million. And what's natural about factory farming, live exports and slaughterhouses?

To find out more, read our Guides, Wheat Eaters or Meat Eaters , Justice Denied and A Matter of Life and Death.

4. Lots of animals kill for food: why shouldn't we?

Animals do lots of things we don't do and wouldn't do! Anyway, we shouldn't kill because we have a choice. Lions and tigers etc have to kill to survive (they are known as obligate carnivores): we don't. Animals can only follow their instincts but we human beings can think about the consequences of our actions. We can recognise the suffering of other animals and we can choose not to inflict it on them. If we choose to make them suffer, what does that say about the human race?

Eating meat, fish, eggs and dairy is causing mass pain and suffering; it is destroying the earth and is costing the health services millions.

To find out more, read our Guides A Matter of Life and Death, Planet on a Plate and Your Health in Your Hands.

5. It's alright to eat animals if they've had a good life.

Would it be alright to kill and eat people if they'd had a good life? And what do we mean by a 'good' life, anyway? In the case of animals, we certainly don't mean a long one. 'Meat' animals are killed as babies in the case of lambs and veal calves or as soon as they become physically mature - the equivalent of human teenagers - and never get to lead any kind of adult life. Animals, of course, want to live just as much as we do. The first instinct every animal has is to survive. By killing them at all, we are taking away from them the most important thing they have; we are denying their intrinsic right to life.

It is also naïve to imagine that any farmed animals lead good lives: the overwhelming majority of them are exploited, neglected and frustrated on factory farms - forced to lead lives of misery by a farming system which sees them only as ways of producing a profit. They then face a violent, frightening death in the slaughterhouse: despite supposedly humane stunning, millions of animals are still conscious when their throats are cut. Even free range and organic animals suffer on farms (see question 6) and they face the same shocking death at a young age as factory-farmed animals.

To find out more about the lives of farmed animals, click here. To find out more about the moral argument against killing animals, read our guide Justice Denied.

6. I only eat organic/free range/fish/chicken/dairy anyway.

Good. Any choice that people make which reduces animal suffering is a welcome choice - but why stop at some kinds of animal or some kinds of suffering? Fish and chicken feel pain and have an instinct to preserve their own lives in just the same way as cows and pigs. They may be less attractive animals to you but that doesn't mean that their lives and suffering are less important to them.

Similarly, although free range and organic animals usually (although not always) lead better lives than factory farmed animals, they still suffer in many ways. For example, so-called free range egg farms may involve thousands of hens being kept in a shed with limited access to outside and to limited land. Even in the better free range/organic egg farms, all male chicks are killed within hours - useless by-products as they do not lay eggs and are too scrawny for meat. All animals kept for farming are prevented from mixing in normal social groups, and ducks never see their ducklings; hens their chicks; pigs have their piglets taken away much too young; dairy cows have their calves ripped from them at one day old. Even on free range farms the male calves are shot as they don't give milk and are the wrong breed for beef. All farms prevent animals from living natural lives. And all are sent for slaughter as soon as there is more profit in killing them than in keeping them alive.

There is no need to farm or to slaughter any animal. Eating any kind of meat contributes to animal suffering - and to the environmental and world hunger problems caused by the meat industry. The less meat people eat the better and many people find that cutting out meat gradually works best for them - but ultimately, the only truly consistent and ethical choice is to eat no meat, dairy or eggs at all.

7. Plants scream when they're pulled out of the ground or are cut up for food.

Yawn, yawn! This question is usually seen as a bit of a joke, but if you want a serious answer here goes!

Plants do not feel pain. They do not have pain receptors, nerves or a central nervous system. The 'screaming' that sensitive equipment has detected when plants are damaged is thought to be caused by movement of gasses. The cut releases the pressure allowing gases inside the plant to move towards the cut, making a noise as they do so. And even if plants did feel pain, the average meat eater is responsible for ten times more plants being killed than the average vegetarian (see question 10) - because all the animals that meat-eaters consume, eat huge amounts of plants themselves.

8. If you were stuck on a desert island, you'd have to eat meat.

Maybe - but if you were stuck on a desert island you might have to run around naked, never take a shower and wipe your bottom with leaves: that doesn't mean that you should do those things the rest of the time.

9. God put animals on earth for us to eat.

Most of us in the UK do not follow religious rules in our lives - but even amongst people with strong religious faith, there is considerable disagreement about whether God wants us to eat animals. No major religions command their followers to eat meat and many devout Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Jews are vegetarian as are all Hare Krishnas and Jains. Most Hindus, of course, eat no red meat. For most religious people the question remains one of individual judgement. Most religions, however, celebrate compassion, kindness and mercy. The abattoir and the factory farm do not seem consistent with that.

10. If we all ate vegetables and crops, wouldn't we need more pesticides?

No. Setting aside the question of whether pesticides are needed at all, if everyone were vegan we would use less pesticides because we would actually grow less crops. Meat animals all eat plants and they convert them into food very inefficiently. On average, a farmed animal has to eat 10kg of plant protein in order to make 1kg of meat - in other words, if the same land was used to grow crops for people to eat, it would be ten times more productive. To put it yet another way, 90% of the crops we feed to animals are wasted. If we didn't eat animals, we wouldn't need to grow those crops or use chemicals on them.

To find out more, click here.

11. Eating fish doesn't cause suffering.

Yes it does. Numerous scientific studies have confirmed that fish do feel pain. Industrial fishing causes them immense suffering because they are killed either by being crushed in the net, having their swim bladders explode when they are brought to the surface or by asphyxiating (being starved of oxygen) on the decks of trawlers. Many fish, especially salmon, are also now intensively farmed and suffer from infectious illnesses, parasites and overcrowding.

12. What would happen to the countryside if we stopped having animals grazing on it?

As we've already seen, we would need to use less of our countryside for agriculture if we were all vegan: that means that more of it could return to a natural state. Britain has less woodland than any other northern European country - we could change that if we didn't need to use land to grow crops like soya and rape for animal feed.

Far from being a loss to the countryside as some people imagine, ending livestock farming would mean a huge toll of suffering would be eliminated and wildlife allowed to recover (see question 1b).

13. Why not do something for people instead of animals?

Veganism does help people. The meat industry causes environmental degradation through things like deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution and the production of greenhouse gases - we would live in a cleaner, better world if we were all vegan. Secondly, because meat production is such an inefficient way of producing food it consumes resources which should go to human beings. In the developing world, land is increasingly being devoted to the production of animal fodder for export to the rich world instead of being used to grow food for the local population. Finally, veganism improves human health, which brings rewards for individuals and also to society as a whole which needs to spend less on health care and lost working days through ill health.

Compassion towards animals is not in competition with compassion towards people. Veganism is a choice each individual can make which improves the lives of animals and human beings. It is also a choice about what people eat - not where they work, what they do in their spare time or how they vote. Many vegans dedicate their lives to human welfare - Gandhi is the classic example of that.

To find out more about how vegans benefits human beings, click here.

14. Hitler was vegetarian.

No he wasn't. He ate meat - just like Himmler, Goering, Adolf Eichmann, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Harold Shipman, Timothy McVeigh, Myra Hindley and almost every other killer in history. So even if he had been vegetarian, it would prove nothing. But he wasn't.

15. All the farmers would be unemployed if we stopped eating meat.

People will still need to eat when we are all vegan so there will still be plenty of jobs for farmers! (In fact the intensive farming of animals has caused severe unemployment in agriculture as so few people are employed to look after so many animals. A vegan world would mean more employed in sustainable methods of farming.)

However, even if farmers did become unemployed that is no reason to keep farming animals for food. Eating meat is harmful to animals, to the planet and to ourselves - if it is right to stop it, the employment prospects of those who work in the meat industry are no reason to keep it going. As has been pointed out, if we got rid of all crime, the police would be out of work and if we got rid of all illness, doctors and nurses would be out of work: that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get rid of crime and illness.

16. I don't mind you being vegan - but you shouldn't try to impose your views on other people. It's a matter of individual choice.

Trying to persuade people to change their minds is not "imposing your views" upon them. It is the kind of healthy disagreement which democracy depends on and which is essential for change to take place.

What we eat is also not simply a matter for individuals. Meat-eating and veganism are not two sides of the same coin: one brings death and suffering to animals, damages the planet and harms human health and the other doesn't. The reason that vegans try to change the minds of non-vegans is because their "individual choice" affects countless other beings, human and non-human.

17. What difference will one person giving up meat make?

A huge difference. The average British meat eater consumes, in the course of their lifetime, 5 cattle, 20 pigs, 29 sheep and lambs, 780 chickens, 46 turkeys, 18 ducks, 7 rabbits, 1, geese and half-a-tonne of fish. That is a lot of lives saved. Just as importantly, the best advertisement for veganism is a healthy and happy vegan: if you turn vegan you will be able to influence others to become part of the movement towards a more compassionate and rational world.

18. We've eaten meat since we were cavemen.

We've lied, stolen, killed one another and made war since we were cavemen too. That doesn't make those things right (see questions 2 and 3).

19. Why do vegans always look ill?

They don't. That's like asking why toupees always look bad - it's just that you only notice the bad ones. If you know someone (who knows someone...) who was ill they do not represent vegans! People like Novak Djokovic, Martin Shaw, Venus Williams, Natalie Portman, Liam Hemsworth, Pamela Anderson, Joanna Lumley and Carl Lewis, winner of 6 Olympic Gold medals, look pretty good on their vegan diets. And you should see the Viva! staff - we're like gods and goddesses here...

20. If the animals weren't happy and healthy, they wouldn't grow/lay eggs etc.

Just not true. People don't grow big because they're happy and neither do animals. Meat chickens today grow almost twice as fast as they did 50 years ago - yet they live in far worse conditions, crammed into stinking, windowless broiler sheds by the tens of thousands and suffering from lameness and other problems. They don't grow big because they're happy but because they have been selectively bred to gain weight quickly, are given growth-promoting drugs and are fed on special diets.

Similarly, dairy cows have been bred to produce far more milk than is natural to them. In fact, the dairy industry relies upon making animals unhappy - by taking their calves away so that humans can drink their mothers' milk - in order to function. Laying hens have been bred to produce so many eggs that they lose calcium into the shells and suffer from brittle bones and fractures as a result. They don't lay eggs because they're happy: they have no choice.

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There is one downside to being vegan: non-vegans ask you the same questions over and over again. Here at Viva! we've compiled our own list of the Top 20 questions and comments that people make about veganism. If you're thinking about becoming vegan, you may find the answer to something that's troubling you here.

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Anyone can be vegan - even cash-strapped students

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Food blogging and Instagram have helped to raise awareness of the benefits of a vegan diet - and many students are embracing this new way of eating

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In this programme, Neil and Catherine discuss why more and more people are becoming vegan. They also teach you six items of useful vocabulary.

This week's question:

Which of these celebrities is vegan?
a) Brad Pitt
b) Jennifer Lopez
c) Miley Cyrus

Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

Vocabulary

in this day and age
these days

ethical
moral

veganism
the vegan diet

arid
dry; too dry to support crops

livestock
farm animals

Transcript

Note: This is not a word for word transcript

Neil
Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English - the programme where we bring you an interesting topic and six items of vocabulary. I'm Neil.

Catherine
And I'm Catherine.

Neil
Now, if you want to fight climate change - what can you do?

Catherine
Well, you can use less electricity...

Neil
Or stop driving...

Catherine
But scientists believe there's another behaviour which has an even bigger impact on the planet, and that is what you eat.

And if you eat no meat or animal products you're what we call 'vegan'. More and more people around the world are going vegan. And today's question: which of these celebrities is vegan? Is it...
a) Brad Pitt,
b) Jennifer Lopez or
c) Miley Cyrus?

Catherine
And I'm going to go for...c) Miley Cyrus.

Neil
Well, we'll find out at the end of the programme. Now, before we go much further, why don't we find out a bit more about exactly what it means to be vegan?

Catherine
Here's Tom Kuehnel from the Vegan Society in the UK.

INSERT
Tom Kuehnel, Vegan Society
Veganism is a way of living which excludes, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation and cruelty to animals. So that's for food, clothing or any other purpose. So we just don't want to use or abuse animals. And we feel like there, you know, there are plenty of alternatives in this day and age. It's never been easier to be vegan.

Neil
Of course, he says that avoiding cruelty to animals is what it's all about, but that doesn't just mean food. If you're a true vegan, then clothing from animals is also out - no more leather shoes!

Neil
Yes. It means 'these days', or 'in the present time' - and is often used to highlight a contrast with a previous time.

Others go vegan because of environmental considerations, as we looked at earlier. Rearing livestock - that means animals like cows and pigs - produces a lot of harmful methane gas. Now, let's just say the animals themselves produce a lot of it from their bodies. The other major reason to choose veganism ...

Neil
... is because they believe it is healthier.

Catherine
In the research from Oxford University we mentioned earlier, scientists found that 8 million deaths per year could be avoided if the world went vegan.

Neil
Now, that's human deaths. They claim that half of this figure would be because we no longer eat red meat, and the other half would be due to eating more healthy fruit and vegetables - as well as fewer people being overweight.

Catherine
And they say that this would have an economic impact too. They suggest that up to $1,000bn a year would be saved due to reduced healthcare costs and increased productivity at work - because fewer people would get sick.

Neil
So, if it's all so simple - why don't we all go vegan tomorrow?

Catherine
Well, meat-eating is an important part of most cultures - not everyone wants to change.

So these jobs would disappear. Now, with up to a third of the planet estimated to be arid - which means dry and unable to support crops - people living in these regions rely on livestock, so people for example like the Berbers in the Sahara region.

Neil
Without animal farming they would be forced to abandon traditional nomadic lifestyles - that's where they move from place to place - and settle in cities.

We asked you about well-known vegans: which of these is vegan?
a) Brad Pitt,
b) Jennifer Lopez or
c) Miley Cyrus?

Catherine
And I said it was Miley Cyrus.

Neil
Well, you're kind of half right, Catherine. In fact, both Brad Pitt and Miley Cyrus are vegan. Jennifer Lopez used to be, but has since started eating meat again, apparently.

Catherine
Now, why don't we wrap up by looking at today's vocabulary one more time?

Well - we started with emissions: gases produced by something or an activity such as digestion. Livestock emissions for example - are gases produced by animals.

Catherine
I still can't believe you still don't have a smartphone in this day and age, Neil.

Catherine
So you have for moral reasons to smartphones?

Neil
Yeah, for me it's important to understand the conditions of the workers in the factory where the smartphone is made.

Neil
Bye for now.

Catherine
Bye!

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BBC Learning English - 6 Minute English / Could you go vegan?

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In this programme, Neil and Catherine discuss why more and more people are becoming vegan. They also teach you six items of useful vocabulary. Which of these celebrities is vegan?a) Brad Pittb) Jennifer Lopezc) Miley Cyrus Listen to the programme to find out the answer.

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Posts about Vegetarianism written by Andrew Jones

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Overview | What is vegetarianism? Veganism? Why are many drawn to these diets? Is it healthy to avoid meat? In this lesson, students create vegetarian menus for fictional characters, then analyze them for nutritional content.

Materials | Computers with Internet access.

Warm-Up | Many teenagers are drawn to vegetarianism, so you might begin class by asking students in your class about their experiences. Are any students currently vegetarians or vegans, or have they been in the past? Do they know any vegetarians? What is the difference between vegetarianism and veganism? What do vegetarians eat? Why do people become vegetarians?

Ask a volunteer to come to the board to write class definitions of vegetarianism (and veganism), and list reasons for becoming vegetarian.

Next, tell students that they will read an article about how making the choice to become a vegetarian or vegan is not an easy one.

Related | Tara Parker-Pope writes about both vegetarians and vegans in "The Challenge of Going Vegan":

From Bill Clinton to Ellen DeGeneres, celebrities are singing the benefits of a vegan diet. Books that advocate plant-based eating are best sellers. But is eliminating meat and dairy as simple as it sounds?

As countless aspiring vegans are discovering, the switch from omnivore to herbivore is fraught with physical, social and economic challenges - at least, for those who don't have a personal chef. The struggle to give up favorite foods like cheese and butter can be made all the harder by harsh words and eye-rolling from unsympathetic friends and family members. Substitutes like almond milk and rice milk can shock the taste buds, and vegan specialty and convenience foods can cost two to three times what their meat and dairy equivalents do. And new vegans quickly discover that many foods in grocery stores and on restaurant menus have hidden animal ingredients.

"The dominant social-cultural norm in the West is meat consumption," said Hanna Schösler, a researcher in the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije University in Amsterdam, who has studied consumer acceptance of meat substitutes. "The people who want to shift to a more vegetarian diet find they face physical constraints and mental constraints. It's not very accepted in our society not to eat meat."

Still, the numbers are substantial, according to according to a 2008 report in Vegetarian Times. Three percent of American adults, 7.3 million people, follow a vegetarian diet, and one million of them are vegans, who eat no animal products at all - no meat, fish, eggs, milk, cheese, even honey. (And 23 million say they rarely eat meat.)

Background Vocabulary: Read the entire article with your class, then answer the questions below. You may wish to introduce students to the following words or concepts before reading: vegetarian, vegan, herbivore, omnivore.

Questions | For reading comprehension and discussion:

1. Why is becoming a vegetarian so difficult?

2. According to a 2008 study, how many Americans are vegetarians?

3. What does the author mean when she describes a "lack of social support" for new vegans or vegetarians?

4. Why are dairy products particularly difficult to replace?

Activity | What does a balanced vegetarian diet look like? Divide students into groups, and instruct them to create a fictional character, specifying sex, age, height, weight and activity level. Groups then plan a full day of vegetarian (or vegan) meals and snacks for their character, like breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack and dinner, including quantities.

Next, have students research how to satisfy nutritional requirements on a vegetarian or vegan diet, using nutritional guidelines for vegetarian children, The Times's health page on vegetarianism and the collection of vegetarian nutrition resources at the U.S.D.A. National Agriculture Library. Ask students to choose several nutrients, based on their research, that are important for vegetarians to consider. Protein, omega-3 fatty acids, iron, zinc, iodine, calcium and vitamins D and B-12 are good options.

Students then return to their fictional characters and use the U.S.D.A. dietary reference calculator to determine the daily recommendations for each nutrient chosen above.

Are the characters eating well? To find out, students look up the nutrient content of the foods they've chosen using the U.S.D.A. nutrient database, add up the totals for the day and compare them with the daily recommendations.

Finally, have groups report back to the class and discuss what they've learned. Did their original vegetarian meals and snacks represent healthy diets? Is it possible to eat healthfully as a vegetarian? Is a vegetarian diet always healthier than an omnivorous one? How could students adapt this activity to determine the healthfulness of an omnivorous diet?

Going Further | Here are three ways that your students can explore this topic further:

Vegetarian Potluck: Students cook vegetarian dishes for a class potluck. Thanksgiving is right around the corner, so students can find recipes and inspiration in the Well blog's 2012, 2011 and 2010 vegetarian Thanksgiving collections. Or, The Times Magazine offers additional recipes for the semi-vegan that it bills as both interesting and not challenging. While the class is enjoying the feast, students can take turns explaining what ingredients and methods were used to create their items.

The Ethics of Eating Meat: Earlier this year, The Times's Ethicist ran a contest, "Tell Us Why It's Ethical to Eat Meat." We mirrored it on The Learning Network by asking as a Student Opinion question: Is it ethical to eat meat? Have students read both the adult comments on the Ethicist piece, as well as the winning essays, and some student comments for or against eating meat, then have a class discussion or invite them to post their own thoughts on the issue on our blog.

Research Writing: Students investigate claims on whether vegetarianism benefits the environment or not. Or they can take the debate one step further, and explore whether veganism is good for everyone. Even if one agrees with the premise that it's good for us or the planet, what are the practical challenges of going vegan? Then, after reading a variety of opinions and articles on the subject, students can write an essay summarizing their findings, or make an argument in favor of one side or the other.
Common Core ELA Anchor Standards, 6-12:
Reading
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.

Speaking and Listening
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
4. Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
McREL Standards

Science
6. Understands relationships among organisms and their physical environment

Mathematics
1. Uses a variety of strategies in the problem-solving process
3. Uses basic and advanced procedures while performing the processes of computation

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Minus the Meat: Analyzing and Creating Healthy Vegetarian Meals

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Overview | What is vegetarianism? Veganism? Why are many drawn to these diets? Is it healthy to avoid meat? In this lesson, students create vegetarian menus for fictional characters, then analyze them for nutritional content. Materials | Computers with Internet access.

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Posted in How to listen to this..., Studying Strategies on Jan 10th, 2013
How to listen to this talk: Graham Hill "Why I'm a weekday vegetarian"

(1) Answer "Before Watching/Listening" questions below.

(2) Listen to it twice.
If you didn't understand everything, listen two more times with subtitles. (Click "English" in the box below the video.)
If you didn't understand everything, visit the website and read the transcript. (Click on the box below the video that says "show transcript". You'll have to visit the TED site to do this.)
For any difficult parts, click on the words in the transcript. Then, you can listen to him say those parts again.
Now, if you're really having trouble, you can listen with subtitles in your language.
After you've listened with subtitles in your language, listen again in English.

(3) Answer the "Comprehension Questions" below.

(4) Answer the "Discussion Questions" below.
Before watching/listening:
Discuss these questions with a partner or write short answers to them on your own.

What's a vegetarian?
How often do you eat meat?
What do you usually do on weekdays?
What do you usually do on weekends?
Watch the Video
Comprehension Questions
What's a "green" guy?
What does it mean to grow up with "hippie" parents?
What website did he start?
What reasons does he give for being a vegetarian?
How much does eating a hamburger a day increase your risk of dying by?
What does hypocritically mean?
How do meat emissions compare to transportation emissions?
How much more water does beef production use than vegetables?
How much more meat do Americans eat now compared to the 50s?
How was he "stalling"?
What was the "binary solution"?
Why didn't he want to become a vegetarian?
What are taste buds?
What does it mean to commit to do something?
What's "weekday veg"?
What are the major "culprits" in terms of environmental damage?
What is red meat?
What is processed meat?
What does it mean to swap something?
What does he suggest swapping out the bad meats with?
What's "sustainably harvested fish"?
What does he mean when he says it's OK to break it here and there?
What's a carbon footprint?

Discussion Questions
Do you like this idea? Why/Why not?
What's a vegan?
What's a factory farm? What do you think the conditions are like?
What else might you give up on weekdays?
What's something you might start doing on weekdays?
How have eating habits changed over the past decades?

Answers to Comprehension Questions
What's a "green" guy? (A "green guy" is an environmentalist, someone who loves nature.)
What does it mean to grow up with "hippie" parents? (His parents were hippies. Hippies are from the late 60s, they like rock music, have long hair, etc.)
What website did he start? (The site is called treehugger.)
What reasons does he give for being a vegetarian? (He discusses three reasons: it's healthier, it's not cruel to animals, and it's better for the environment)
How much does eating a hamburger a day increase your risk of dying by? (It increases the risk by 1/3.)
What does hypocritically mean? (It means to act differently than you think others should act.)
How do meat emissions compare to transportation emissions? (Meat emissions are greater.)
How much more water does beef production use than vegetables? (100 times more.)
How much more meat do Americans eat now compared to the 50s? (They eat twice as much.)
How was he "stalling"? (He was delaying becoming a vegetarian. to stall = to delay, to wait for something to happen before acting.)
What was the "binary solution"? (He felt he must choose between two things: meat eater or vegetarian.)
Why didn't he want to become a vegetarian? (He likes the taste of meat)
What are taste buds? (They are the things on your tongue that let you taste food.)
What does it mean to commit to do something? (To make a promise to yourself or others that you'll do it.)
What's "weekday veg"? (It's someone who is a vegetarian Monday thru Friday, but sometimes eats meat on the weekend.)
What are the major "culprits" in terms of environmental damage? (A culprit is the guilty person/thing, the one that did something wrong. Red and processed meats cause the most damage.)
What is red meat? (It's darker meat, red when uncooked.)
What is processed meat? (Meats that aren't simply cut from the animal-for example, bacon, hot dogs, etc.)
What does it mean to swap something (It means to exchange it or replace it.)
What does he suggest swapping out the bad meats with? (He suggests eating sustainably harvested fish instead of red/processed meats.)
What's "sustainably harvested fish"? (Fish that are caught without reducing the total number of fish.)
What does he mean when he says it's OK to break it here and there? (It's OK to stop doing it sometimes.)
What's a carbon footprint? (The amount of carbon that is used because of you.)

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How to listen to this talk: Graham Hill "Why I'm a weekday vegetarian"

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Posted in How to listen to this..., Studying Strategies on Jan 10th, 2013 How to listen to this talk: Graham Hill "Why I'm a weekday vegetarian" (1) Answer "Before Watching/Listening" questions below. (2) Listen to it twice. If you didn't understand everything, listen two more times with subtitles.

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Why I'm A Vegan  |  Moby | TEDxVeniceBeach

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Vegans Vs. Meat Eaters: What Is The Right Diet? | Middle Ground

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IT IS lunchtime and a queue is forming for the burgers at Krowarzywa, voted the city's best in an online poll: students, families, businessmen in suits. This is Warsaw, where (you might think) lunch is usually a slab of meat with a side order of sausage. But at Krowarzywa-which means "cow alive" and contains the word warzywa, meaning vegetables-no animals were harmed in the making of the food. The burgers are made of millet, tofu or chickpeas. The bestselling "vegan pastrami" is made of seitan, a wheat-based meat substitute.

Warsaw has almost 50 vegan restaurants. That does not mean it has all that many vegans. Kassia, a 20-something professional in the queue, says she has no ethical objection to eating meat. She comes to Krowarzywa because she likes the food. Kornel Kisala, the head chef, thinks that most of Krowarzywa's clientele eat meat, but it does not worry him. "Animals don't care whether you eat a vegan burger because it is fashionable or because it is tasty." Altogether, 60% of Poles say they plan to cut back on meat this year. Eating vegetarian and vegan meals now and then is one of the ways some choose to do so.

Interest in vegan food has been booming across the rich world. Celebrity claims of veganism are everywhere: Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Serena and Venus Williams, Lewis Hamilton, Mike Tyson, Beyoncé, take your pick. In America sales of "plant-based" foods-a term for foods that contain no meat, eggs or dairy that reliably says "vegan" to vegans but doesn't say "weird" to the less committed-rose 20% in the year to June 2018, according to Nielsen, a market-research group. That was ten times the growth in food as a whole that year and two and a half times faster than vegan foods grew in the year before.

McDonald's is offering McVegan burgers in Scandinavia. The American restaurants in the TGI Fridays chain sell soyabean burgers that ooze blood made of beetroot juice. Tyson Foods, one of the world's largest meat producers, recently bought 5% of Beyond Meat, the company which makes them. Waitrose, a posh British grocery chain, introduced a range of vegan food in 2017, expanded the selection by 60% in mid-2018 and says sales of vegan and vegetarian foods in July 2018 were 70% above the level in July 2017.

Some people see great things in this. Two years ago Eric Schmidt, a Silicon Valley figure who used to be chairman of Google, called plant-based meat substitutes the world's most important future technology; he foresaw them improving people's health, reducing environmental degradation and making food more affordable for the poor in developing countries. The founder of the first vegan society said in 1944 that "in time [people] will view with abhorrence the idea that men once fed on the products of animals' bodies." Many since have shared his hope. Perhaps their time is come at last.

If so, it is a slow coming. Meat consumption worldwide has been growing consistently by almost 3% a year since 1960, mostly because people in poor countries buy more meat as they get richer, and the trend has yet to slow. In the early 1970s the average Chinese person ate 14kg (31lb) of meat a year. Now they eat 55kg, which is 150g, or five ounces, a day. But though most growth in consumption has been in the developing world, rich countries are eating more meat, too; their consumption is just not growing as fast as it used to. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), meat consumption in the richest nations has risen 0.7% a year since 1991.

Polling data is used to claim that the number of vegans in rich countries is both quite high-around 10% in some European countries-and growing. But there is reason to doubt at least the first of these. Some of the best data come from Britain, home of the world's first vegan society. A poll carried out by that society in 2016 found that 1.05% of people in Britain never ate meat or animal products. This is considerably higher than the result the society got in 2007, which suggests real growth in numbers. But it is a far cry from the 5.3% of the population reported as vegan in a more recent poll. In general, polls seem to find many more people claiming to be vegan than they do people abstaining from all meat, fish and animal products.

In America, Nielsen found in 2017 that 3% of the population called themselves vegans and 6% vegetarians (people who eschew meat, but eat eggs and/or dairy products). This proportion seems more or less stable; the country's largest polling organisations, Gallup and Harris, both found 3% of the population calling themselves vegan over the period 2012-18. But more detailed research by Faunalytics, a company which has been running large surveys of eating habits for 20 years, puts the numbers at just 0.5% for vegans and 3.4% for vegetarians. Fully a quarter of 25- to 34-year-olds in America claim to be either vegan or vegetarian, whereas studies by Faunalytics find the median age of American vegans to be 42, four years older than the national median. It seems that a fair amount of aspirational self-deception, terminological inexactitude or simple hypocrisy is at play.

The idea that veganism is most widely espoused, if not necessarily adhered to, by the young seems to be true in many countries. In Germany, according to Mintel, a research firm, 15% of 16- to 24-year-olds say that they are vegetarian, compared with 7% of the population at large. In many countries declared vegans lean towards the political left. In America polling by Pew has found that 15% of liberals espouse a meat-free diet, as opposed to 4% of Republicans. American vegans and vegetarians are also poorer than average, and twice as likely to be single. Three-quarters of them are women. This all fits veganism's association with valuing health, simplicity and low environmental impact-an implicit rejection of the values and coronary arteries of older red-meat-eating men.

Veganism is not a way of life that it is easy to keep up. According to Faunalytics, for every active American vegetarian or vegan there are more than five people who say they have abandoned such a diet. The growth in the number of restaurants catering to veganism and the availability of plant-based products on shelves may reduce this churn and allow more to stick with the programme. As it is, a moving target makes it unsurprising that accurate figures on veganism are hard to come by.

Overall, though, it seems safe to say that the number of people sometimes or regularly choosing to eat vegan food is growing much faster than the growth in people deeply committed to a meat-, egg- and dairy-free life. Patrice Bula, a vice-president at Nestlé, says he thinks that only a quarter of the people buying his company's vegan meals are committed vegetarians or vegans. People in this larger group are often called "flexitarians", who shift back and forth between omnivorous and vegetable diets. Almost two Americans in five say they fit this category, says Nielsen. The true vegan efflorescence lies in casual, part-time veganism.
Flexible friends of the Earth
In rich countries, people become flexitarians as a response to three concerns: their own health; the health of the environment; and the welfare of animals. On all three, they have a point; on at least the first two, though, a lot of the benefits can be captured without strict veganism.

The direct evidence that vegan and vegetarian diets are in themselves good for people is mixed. Between 2002 and 2007, 73,000 Seventh Day Adventists, a religious group in America, participated in a study of eating habits. The 27,000 vegans and vegetarians among them had significantly lower mortality rates. A smaller survey of British vegetarians from 2016, though, found no such link.

Aspects of veganism do go with the grain of some health advice. Large studies have shown that people who eat a lot of red meat have higher overall mortality rates (the same does not apply to eating poultry). Eating a lot of processed meat is linked to colorectal cancer. The evidence on this seems clear enough for various authorities to recommend limits to the total ingestion of red meat-the World Cancer Research Fund suggests less than 500g a week-and minimising the intake of processed meats such as bacon and salami.

And the damage to health done by meat is not all captured in the sort of studies that reliably cast doubt on diets heavy in red meat. Lots of factors, both dietary and non-dietary, influence health problems such as obesity, high blood pressure or diabetes, and it is hard to understand exactly what is responsible for what. Comparing diets on a statistical basis, though, allows some striking inferences. In 2016 a study by Marco Springmann and colleagues at the University of Oxford found that, globally, a transition to well-balanced vegan diets might result in 8.1m fewer deaths a year. Universal vegetarianism would avoid 7.3m deaths.

If the associations on which this computer modelling is based are robust, those are impressive figures. But much of the benefit they claim to demonstrate could still be realised if omnivores ate better-balanced diets with less meat. If the world adopted what the study called a healthy global diet, with less sugar than most in the West consume, plenty of fruit and veg and just 43g of red meat a day, the number of deaths avoided would still be 5.1m.

Red meat is typically a quarter to a third protein by weight, so just 43g is nowhere near enough to supply the 50-60g of protein a day that people require (the exact amount depends on a person's weight, amount of exercise and several other factors). The global healthy diet thus has people relying on quite a lot of plant protein, too. Rich-world diets, though, tend to get all their daily protein requirement from animals, and then some. Americans eat 90g of protein a day, Europeans 85g, and most of it comes from animal products.

Because meat is energy rich, eating more than your protein needs dictate means taking on a lot of calories, which may well be stored as fat. Vegans both eat less protein and get it from less energy-rich and potentially fattening products. In 2017 a French study found that both vegans (62g of protein a day) and vegetarians (67g) were healthier than the meat eaters wolfing down 81g. They were also eating more varied diets, and, perhaps crucially, fewer calories overall; it may have been those choices, rather than veganism per se, that made the difference.

On the environment, too, vegans and vegetarians have a point. Growing their food requires less land than raising meat does. Animals do not turn all the energy in the crops they eat into calories in their muscles. They need some of that energy to stay alive-and while that overhead is good for the animals, from a food-production standpoint it looks like a waste. This waste means you need more land per calorie of food if you are producing beef than if you are producing broccoli. Admittedly, a lot of grazing is on land that would not necessarily be suitable for arable farming. But the FAO's finding that raising livestock takes about 80% of all agricultural land and produces just 18% of the world's calories is still telling.

Alon Shepon of the Weizmann Institute and colleagues have looked at this in terms of opportunity costs. Choosing to make a gram of protein by feeding an egg-laying hen, rather than getting the equivalent of a gram of egg protein from plants, has an opportunity cost of 40%. Getting the gram of protein from beef represents an opportunity cost of 96% (see chart 1). They argue that if America stopped paying these opportunity costs and got the protein from plants in the first place, it would be equivalent to increasing the food supply by a third-or eliminating all of the losses due to food waste.

Being so land hungry means cattle farming changes the climate; clearing land for pasture creates greenhouse gases. On top of that, the bugs in ruminant digestive systems produce methane, a fairly powerful greenhouse gas. Once it gets out of the cows-by belching, mainly, not, as is commonly thought, farting-this warms the world. The FAO calculates that cattle generate up to two-thirds of the greenhouse gases from livestock, and are the world's fifth largest source of methane. If cows were a country, the United Herds of Earth would be the planet's third largest greenhouse-gas emitter.

Mr Springmann and his colleagues calculated that in 2050 greenhouse emissions from agriculture in a vegan world would be 70% lower than in a world where people ate as they do today; in the "healthy global diet" world they would be 29% lower. The savings are not all owing to cows; but a large part of them are (see chart 2). Raising cattle produces seven times more in terms of emissions per tonne of protein than raising pork or poultry does, 12 times more than soya and 30 times more than wheat. Giving up beef captures many of the benefits of going vegan. Other animals make a lot less difference. Getting your protein from insects-very efficient converters-might be almost indistinguishable from veganism in environmental terms.

Except, that is, to the insects. One of the main things that motivates many vegans and vegetarians is a belief that killing and eating animals is wrong. The vegans also abstain from milk and eggs because there, too, they see a lot of exploitation, death and suffering (the question of honey remains a point of contention). In dairy herds calves are typically taken from their mothers within 24 hours, compared with the nine months to a year they would suckle if left to themselves. Male calves are killed or reared for meat. In industrial egg-production day-old male chicks are killed and simply discarded. Even if one keeps strictly to meat, though, the death toll involved is immense. Over 50bn farm animals are killed for meat every year.
#MooToo
The best known proponent of the case that this matters is Peter Singer, a philosopher at Princeton University. Mr Singer argues that treating the interests of humans as superior to those of other animals is a prejudice, analogous to treating men as superior to women or whites as superior to blacks. It depends on an arbitrary distinction between two groups, one of which has the power to make the distinction stick.

What matters, he says, is not what species an individual belongs to but its capacity for suffering. If an animal suffers as much as a person, then things that it would be impermissible to do to a person-killing and eating him, immobilising him in a cage-are unacceptable if done to the animal, too. "In suffering," Mr Singer writes, "the animals are our equals."

This moral point would seem to depend in part on an empirical point; to what extent and in what manner do animals suffer? Animals' brains contain regions clearly analogous to those correlated with consciousness, perception and emotion in humans. What that reveals about their suffering as compared with a human's is a subtle question. But they definitely feel pain, and some can both express preferences and, it would appear, hold beliefs about the preferences of others. That would seem to have some moral salience.

But would it be better for animals that suffer not to exist at all? A vegan world would have no need of cows, happy or sad. The genus Bos currently numbers some 1.5bn. Should those lives be valued less than the lives of the wildlife which might repopulate their overgrown pastures when they are gone? When it comes to wild animals, people tend to abhor population collapse; are things that different when it comes to domestic animals?

Mr Singer's project of seeking legal rights for animals is certainly going to be a tough row to hoe, if not an impossible one. Neither courts nor legislatures seem very interested. Reducing the cruelty that animals suffer, though, is more plausible, both through legislation-battery cages for hens have been banned in the EU since 2013-and through consumer pressure, such as a preference for free-range products, cruelty-free certification, transparent sourcing and the like. This second route, though, is not available to vegans.

Though biology is not destiny, humans, like their relatives the chimpanzees, evolved as omnivores; the evidence is in the teeth and the guts. If people's diet is otherwise restricted, for example to staple starches, meat does them good. As the increasing consumption of meat worldwide shows, a lot of people in most cultures really do like eating it; the vast majority will do so, at least a bit, when they get the chance. The great exception is India, where, mostly for religious reasons, about 30% of the population has a vegetarian lifestyle.

None of that makes veganism, full- or part-time, and the spread of plant-based foods irrelevant. A mixture of ethical concerns, innovative cuisine like Mr Kisala's and more convenient vegan shopping at supermarkets could yet see the rich world reach "peak meat" and head down the other side. If so, and in particular if reduced consumption of red meat is part of the process, there will probably be substantial gains in health and happiness. And if the world improves standards in the meat-rearing operations that remain, some of that may even be shared with animals.

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Why people in rich countries are eating more vegan food

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IT IS lunchtime and a queue is forming for the burgers at Krowarzywa, voted the city's best in an online poll: students, families, businessmen in suits. This is Warsaw, where (you might think) lunch is usually a slab of meat with a side order of sausage.

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Every Argument Against Veganism | Ed Winters | TEDxBathUniversity

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Below is a list (part one of four) of arguments against veganism and the well thought out counter argument. It's a handy guide for vegans to refer to when they find themselves in a debate defending their beliefs. If you find a factual or logical error in one of the replies, or if you can't find the answer you're looking for, please drop us a message in the comments.

1. Animals eat other animals

Yes, this is true. But we should not base our ethics as a society on what animals do in nature. Lions eat their offsprings if they don't have enough food, engage in violent territorial disputes and forcibly impregnate females. Dogs smell each others' backside when they first meet. Many animals even kill members of their own species. If you say that animals doing something is a justification for us doing it, then by this logic you could advocate murder, infanticide, rape and several other unethical and/or disgusting behaviour that you don't engage in.

Another crucial point is that animals in nature kill to survive. We don't need to eat other animals to survive, and doing so causes suffering, so if we can avoid it, we should. Animals are not good ethical role models.

2. Top of the food chain / Circle of life

Scientist have proven that we are in fact not at the top of the food chain. This study by the National Academy of Sciences of the United States concluded that "humans are similar to anchovy or pigs and cannot be considered apex predators". This means that everyone that uses the "circle of life" or "we're at the top of the food chain" argument should be fine with being violently eaten by other animals higher in the food chain like lions or bears. In fact, they should be fine with having the same treatment as pigs since we are at their same level.

But we are superior to pigs!?

3. Eating animals is necessary

It's not. There are millions of vegans from all paths of life and in all circumstances that follow a vegan diet. In fact, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the United States' largest organisation of food and nutrition professionals, states the following:

"It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage. Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity."

The largest study ever done on vegan nutrient profiles states the following:

"In strict vegetarians low dietary intakes of vitamin B12 and D, calcium, and omega-3 fatty acids, in addition to iron and zinc, have often been of concern 25. In the present study, mean intakes of these nutrients were above minimum requirements 26 in strict vegetarians."

So eating animal products is not necessary for health and well-being.

4. Eating animals is natural

It doesn't matter if it is, because something being natural doesn't mean it's ethical or good. This is an "appeal to nature fallacy". You don't do things solely because they're natural. You use planes, cars, medicine, operations, doors, buildings, clothing, cutlery, cups, and an array of things that are not natural. There are other natural things you avoid, such as killing members of your own species and forcibly impregnating females, because nature is a violent place. Some diseases and health problems are natural, but you do whatever you can to unnaturally get better. Our civilisation is based largely on focusing on reducing suffering rather than in staying aligned with nature. In many cases, we strive to avoid the perils of nature. You should do what's ethical, not what is natural. Abusing and killing animals when you don't need to is unethical, regardless of it being natural.

5. Humans are omnivores

There is still a debate about whether or not we are omnivores. There is a lot of evidence pointing towards humans being herbivores, or at least scavengers (like rats, who eat their meat after it has been killed by other predators). This article by William C. Roberts, MD argues humans are plant eaters because only herbivores develop atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). I personally think vegans are omnivores just because we can digest meat, but that our preferred source of fuel is plants. But it doesn't matter, because we can be completely healthy as vegans, and eating meat causes harm to animals, so we shouldn't do it. Having the ability to do something doesn't mean it's right to do so. Human beings can carry out many atrocities, and some do, but those that do face punishment because their actions are wrong. Having canine teeth or the ability to digest meat doesn't justify eating animals in the same way having a fist doesn't justify beating someone up.

6. Most people eat meat

So what? This is an "appeal to popularity" fallacy and holds no true logical value. Most people in the past thought slavery was acceptable and that women shouldn't vote. Most people usually agree with a certain oppression and it is a small group of people that fight to change the status quo.

7. Our ancestors ate meat

Our ancestors did many things that you would find disturbing, including killing each other, and don't do many things you do today that improve your life. Basing your ethics on cavemen is not going to take you very far. Our knowledge has improved, and our ethical behaviour should improve accordingly.

8. Eating meat helped us evolve

It doesn't matter if it did, because we live in a very different world and different things today will make us evolve other than eating meat. Also, that something helped us evolve doesn't mean that such behaviour is ethical or acceptable today. Early homo sapiens used rape as a strategy for gene-promotion when they could not get access to consensual sex. This helped the human species evolve to where we are today, but I don't see anyone justifying rape because it might have helped us evolve.

In addition, most scientists agree that it wasn't meat, but cooking foods, that made our brains evolve. This would explain why we're the smartest animals and the only animals that cook, while other more carnivorous animals like cats are less intelligent than us. The hypothesis is that cooking allowed humans to get more energy from the same amount of food, and to spend less time chewing, which meant this extra energy helped fuel brain growth.

9. Eating meat is healthy

You can be completely healthy eating a non-vegan diet, as long as you limit your intake of meats with high saturated fat and cholesterol and eat enough fruits and vegetables to get essential micronutrients. Many meat eaters live long and healthy lives. The vegan argument doesn't say that veganism is right because you can't be healthy otherwise, it merely states that given the choice of being healthy as a vegan or a non-vegan, you should choose the former since it is more ethical.

10. Farmed animals are bred to be killed

Bringing any animal into existence for the purpose of abusing, using them and harming them is not ethical under any circumstance. If you breed a dog for dogfighting, the harm inflicted on the dog by the fight is not ethical. If you breed bulls for bullfighting, the harm inflicted on them is never justified.

The animals that are being used and killed do not care about why they were bred, they just want to live and avoid suffering. It is not our right to go against those interest just because we brought them into existence.

11. Farmed animals would go extinct

Livestock animals have been selectively bred and modified by humans to be profitable. They suffer all kinds of health problems because they are bred to be much bigger than their natural ancestors. Continuing to breed them serves no purpose, even if everybody was vegan there would be no logical reason to keep breeding these animals, knowing they will suffer health problems due to the manner of their selective breeding.

But if we really wanted to keep pigs, chickens, cows and the animals we eat alive, we can conserve them in the same way endangered species are, i.e. not by slitting their throats. There are many animal sanctuaries that exist today where farmed animals are rescued and live their entire lives, so they wouldn't go extinct.

12. Farmed animals would overpopulate

The animals we eat, wear and experiment on have been artificially bred to meet the demand for their bodies and their secretions. If the demand for animal products decreases, the number of animals brought into existence will decrease too. There was no problem with overpopulation of cows, chickens and pigs before humans started messing with their bodies and altering them for profit. If we stop breeding them out of control, they wouldn't overpopulate.

There are several other similar lists that you might find helpful: George Martin's Carnism Debunked, Vegan Sidekick's Guide and Your Vegan Fallacy Is.

In our next issue we will cover 12 MORE rebuttals to anti-vegan arguments. Stay tuned!

In our next issue we will cover 12 MORE rebuttals to anti-vegan arguments. Stay tuned!

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The Complete Guide To EVERY Anti-Vegan Argument

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Below is a list (part one of four) of arguments against veganism and the well thought out counter argument. It's a handy guide for vegans to refer to when they find themselves in a debate defending their beliefs.

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Butchers v vegans: Is it OK to attack meat businesses to save animals?

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REVEALED: Why These 13 Actors WENT VEGAN (pt 1)  | LIVEKINDLY