3.1: No Meat, Fish, or Eggs
The six main categories of disadvantages of meat-eating are:
- Health
- Ethics
- Economics
- Environment
- Karma
- Harm to spiritual life
Ultimately, devotees are only interested in what pleases Krishna (point 6). Krishna is not pleased when we kill His creatures for our own gratification. But the other reasons are still of interest and worth examining.
- Excess protein creates excess nitrogen in the system, which creates fatigue.
- Meat contains lots of uric acid, which leeches calcium from the system. People who eat meat have the weakest bones.
- The body can deal with about 8g of uric acid in one day. An average piece of meat (3-4oz) contains 16g. Uric acid in the bloodstream creates arthritis: it irritates the tendons and joints.
- Meat products carry disease and infections.
- 50% of people in the U.S. die of heart disease, 33% die of cancer. Meat is a primary cause of heart disease and cancer.
- Excess cholesterol from meat accumulates inside arteries leading to high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke.
- The livestock population of the US consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed the entire human population 5 times over.
- By feeding the grains to livestock, we receive only 10% of the available kilojoules.
- For every 16kg of grain and soybeans, we get 1kg of flesh in return.
- Supplying a meat-eater for one year requires 3¼ acres; Supplying a lacto-ovo vegetarian for one year requires ½ acre; Supplying a pure vegetarian for one year requires 1/6 acre.
- If Americans reduced meat consumption by just 10%, it would free 12 million tons of grain annually for human consumption — an amount that would entirely feed the 60 million people who will starve to death this year.
- The water required to raise a 1000 pound steer would float a destroyer.
- If the water required to produce beef were not subsidised, the cheapest hamburger meat would cost $35 per pound (Vegetarian Times, 1985).
- Corn and wheat provide 22 times more protein than beef for the amount of fossil fuel expended. Soybeans provide 40 times more.
Well-known vegetararians: Leonardo daVinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Pythagoras, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Socrates, Plato, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Schweizer, Gandhi, Albert Einstein.