KarmaFree Cooking

October is National Vegetarian Awareness Month… YEAH!!!!! And as part of the celebration, I received an email listing 30 reasons to go vegetarian/vegan and I wanted to share with you the ones that resonated with me most…  (I guess, one per day of the month… but they left Halloween out. Why???)

This list was compiled by The Huffington Post.

• Because if you want to get healthy, you should start with food! Replace cancer-causing, fat, pesticide and hormone-laced meats with cancer-preventing, anti-inflammatory, cholesterol lowering foods like apples, broccoli, blueberries, carrots, flax, garlic, leafy greens, nuts and sweet potatoes.
• Because vegetarians are about 40% less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters.
• Because our meat-centric diet is woefully lacking in health-giving fiber, contained only in plant-based foods. A minimum of 35 grams per day is recommended; the typical American consumes only 12.
• Because four out of five Americans with cardiovascular disease who switch to a healthy (low-fat, whole foods) vegetarian diet reverse their symptoms completely.
• The news gets better. Heart and blood-vessel diseases, diabetes, and of course obesity are preventable for 95% of us if we follow a healthy vegan diet, exercise, and manage stress.
• Because of pink slime. PERIOD.
• Because we are going to run out of food if we keep growing most of it to feed animals, who in turn feed far fewer people than if we grew the food to feed directly to people. (One can feed 16 to 20 vegetarians with the same amount of natural resources as a single meat eater.)
• Because along with hundreds of scientists and many major media, the head of the U.N.’s Nobel Prize-winning panel on climate change urged people to cut back on meat to combat climate change.
• Because in ways that truly matter, we are all the same. Think about it. Whether human or non-human animal, we all seek happiness and pleasure, we all try to avoid pain and suffering. We all have rich and complex emotional lives.

Even if you’re not ready to take the plunge completely into a vegetarian lifestyle, I hope KarmaFree Cooking helps you see that a vegetarian lifestyle is something doable, delicious, and easy-to-follow. Cutting meat once a week, a few days a week, the whole work-week or everyday… whatever little change you make for the better will be an improvement to your health, your lifestyle and the whole world around us.

Help me spread the word…

Tags: awareness, food, vegetarian