Caged chickens and hormones

If most of us thought about the conditions in which chickens used for meat and eggs are raised and slaughtered, we'd become vegetarian on the spot. Egg-laying chickens can be raised in cages with 6 chickens to a cage, each chicken getting only 67 square inches of space for its lifetime.

Unless they're certified and labeled as being free-range or organic or natural, they might have been fed growth hormones to get them to slaughter faster, and antibiotics to combat the diseases which come from being raised in cramped and less-than-clean conditions. 

And consider what the recommendations are for cleaning up after touching poultry? It's recommended to clean surfaces with bleach to remove bacteria, and to wash your hands thoroughly after touching a chicken.

Do you really want to put something into your body that requires bleach to clean up after? Something that needs to be cooked to specific temperatures to be sure you've destroyed any bacteria that could make you sick?

Chickens and turkeys have become so mass-produced and injected with antibiotics and hormones that there's no taste to it anymore, so why bother? Even the most humanely treated chicken has either been stunned in a salt-water brine before being beheaded. In John Robbins excellent book and video, Diet for a Small Planet, he shows us pictures of chickens being grabbed in groups by the neck and thrown into cages. Can you really consider eating a chicken with that vision in your head?

Any means of mass-producing animals for human consumption is by its very nature unhealthy and cruel for the animals, and unhealthy for humans as well. Even if you're of the opinion that man is a natural hunter, how natural is it to eat an animal that's been raised in captivity and fed a diet of hormones and antibiotics?

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PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

People have different motivations for eating a vegetarian diet. For many people, it's a health issue. They need to reduce their weight, bring down their blood pressure and cholesterol, manage their blood sugars. A vegetarian diet helps them do this.

For others, it's also moral and ethical decision not to eat animal products. Through the centuries, we've become accustomed to thinking of man as superior to all other animals on the planet. We use animals for food, clothing, shoes, belts or other accessories. We use them for scientific experiments. We discount their place on the earth and consider that animals are here to serve us and our needs.

PETA stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and is an organization devoted to changing that mindset among humans. They are against using animals for food or for clothing, especially for what they consider the needless or particularly inhumane use of animals, such as killing or trapping them for their fur.

They are passionate about their cause. In their own words, PETA believes that animals have rights and deserve to have their best interests taken into consideration, regardless of whether they are useful to humans. Like you, they are capable of suffering and have an interest in leading their own lives; therefore, they are not ours to use-for food, clothing, entertainment, experimentation, or any other reason.

We are supposedly an evolved society. But how evolved can a society be that thrives on the suffering of animals? In his excellent book, When Elephants Weep, author Jeffrey Masson explores the emotional lives of animals and presents compelling evidence for it. As a species, we must begin to re-evaluate our place on this earth and where we fit in relation to every other creature that inhabits it. PETA believes this as well and is a passionate advocate for the rights of animals.

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Why switch to vegetarianism ?

If you've eaten meat and animal products your whole life, you might think, why switch to a vegetarian diet? You've lived your whole life eating eggs, hamburgers, hot dogs, poultry, so why switch now?

There could be many reasons to switch. Start by looking in the mirror. Are you at a healthy weight? Do you look and feel good most of the time? Do you wake up energized? Or do you wake up tired and sluggish?

How is your general health? Is your blood pressure within a healthy range? Are your cholesterol and blood sugar ranges normal? If they're not, consider what you're eating on a daily basis.

How do you feel after eating? Do you feel energized, as if you've fed your body what it needs? Or are you tired and dragged out? Do you often need a nap after eating? Is that what food is supposed to do for us, make us tired and sleepy?

Not really. Food should nourish and feed the body and leave us energized and refreshed. The human body is a machine and needs fuel that keeps it running in peak condition. When we're fat, with high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, high cholesterol and other unhealthy conditions, it's like a car engine that hasn't been tuned or isn't running on the optimal type of gasoline it needs to run efficiently. Your body is the same way. It needs the right kind of fuel to run at peak efficiency, and when you're eating high-fat meat, or meat that's been fed antibiotics throughout its life, that's simply not the kind of fuel the human body evolved to run on.

Try eating vegetarian for a week or a month. See if you don't feel different, more mentally acute and more physically fit and energized. At least reverse the portion sizes you've been eating, and make meat more of a side dish, if you can't stop eating meat altogether. Even that change can make a big difference in your overall health and well-being.

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Traditional Meat

How did our family traditions become targeted around eating meat? Think concerning it. When we assume of Thanksgiving, we tend to assume of turkey. If we tend to eat pork, then New Year's celebrations often revolve around pork and sauerkraut. At Christian Easter, the ancient meal is ham. And in the summer, we have a tendency to stay up for that initial hamburger or steak on the grill.

How did that happen to a species that was designed to eat vegetables and fruits, nuts, berries and legumes?

We will imagine that eating meat was initially an opportunistic event, born of the need to survive. The style of cooked meat, plus the sustained energy that came from eating high-fat meat merchandise created primitive sense even to earliest man.

Initially, finding cooked animal meat, from a forest hearth, would are cause for celebration. It's something everybody in a clan would have participated in eating along. When man learned to hunt and moved to a hunting orientation, instead of a hunter-gatherer orientation, he would have done this in groups. They would have had to hunt in groups, and killing an animal for food would have been a cluster effort. Looking and killing an animal meant food not simply for the individual, except for the clan, and would are cause for celebration when the hunters brought the food home.

If they brought the animal back to the clan, it'd have taken a cluster effort to skin the animal and tear or cut the meat from the carcass. Everyone would have participated during this, and subsequently, shared in the rewards of their work.

It's simple to see how, once we did not have to seek for meat, however could obtain it, the necessity for gathering and celebration was deeply ingrained in our natures. We celebrate the seasons and life's events with family and friends, and because those early celebrations concerned eating meat, that tradition has continued to trendy times.

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Why did humans start eating meat?

It should have felt unnatural at first, to eat animal flesh. When all, we're not thus so much faraway from animals ourselves. Perhaps it even felt cannibalistic. There would possibly not have been that abundant intellectual distinction between humans and other animals. When humans were pure vegetarians, they were living in harmony with the world and with the opposite creatures co-habiting the planet with them. Their closest animal relatives, apes, were vegetarians. Eating the product of the earth, like plants, grains and fruits that they might gather and eat would have appeared the natural order of things.

But necessity is that the mother of invention. Prehistoric men who lived in frozen geographies, or who lived in an area that became devastated by hearth, would have eaten something to survive. Just just like the soccer players whose plane crashed in the mountains of Chile, and were forced to eat the flesh of alternative players who died in the crash, earliest man at some purpose had to make the selection for survival, and that could have consuming meat for the primary time and changing human history - and health - forever.

We will imagine that men first ate meat that had been charred or cooked by virtue of being caught in an exceedingly natural forest fire. They would possibly have subsequently eaten raw meat, if necessary, but we tend to can conjointly imagine that our earliest digestive systems rebelled against eating raw meat.

Imagine having eaten raw foods and vegetables for eons, and all of a sudden, incorporating meat product into your system. You may have heard friends who were vegetarians tell stories of attempting to eat meat and turning into violently sick afterwards.

Biologists will tell you we tend to're very not designed to eat meat, but we have a tendency to adapted to it. But, in the timeline of human history, eating meat could be a relatively recent evolutionary development.

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Humans did not perpetually eat meat.

Do you ever assume regarding how far we have a tendency to've diverted from the trail of our pre-historic ancestors and they're eating patterns? Consider how the earliest humans evolved, and what they ate. They were hunter-gatherers and didn't evolve with the characteristics of carnivores. Humans are not made to tear animals apart and eat their flesh. When you take a look at carnivorous animals, such as wild cats, you'll see their teeth are designed to tear and tear, not chew. 

Humans evolved from vegetarian creatures. Even our digestive systems aren't significantly suited to eating meat. Eating meat is a relatively recent development in human history, possibly born of opportunity and necessity. Perhaps earliest man observed carnivores eating meat, and if they could not realize any of the natural foods they were used to eating, like vegetables, berries, nuts and grains, then they may have assumed that eating meat would at least sustain life. 

But initially we have a tendency to emulated the creatures we evolved from, herbivores like apes. Even to a prehistoric mind, apes would have looked like man, walking primarily upright, with arms and hands. We have a tendency to naturally would have foraged for our food, eating roots and berries, fruits and nuts. We tend to would have watched the apes peeling bananas, or crushing nuts on stones to get at the meat of the nut. 

We tend to would have been living additional moment-to-moment, constantly foraging for food. Hunting, after all, needs thought and planning. Eating meat needs preparation and most importantly, hearth. Until man discovered fire, he was primarily vegetarian, living in what was the natural order of things. Vegetarian eating may be a more natural approach of eating, in addition to being healthier. It's a manner that's in balance with the world, and doesn't obtain to dominate it and conquer it.

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You are what you eat

You have actually heard the expression many times, "You're what you eat." Have you ever really considered what it means that? And do you think concerning it when you are making food decisions?

In some ways that, we do become what we have a tendency to eat, literally. Have you ever seen an example of your blood plasma once eating a fast food hamburger? What was previously a clear liquid becomes cloudy with the fat and cholesterol that is absorbed from eating a high-fat hamburger.

And when you think concerning it, we tend to also become what we have a tendency to do not eat. When we tend to switch from eating meat to a vegetarian-based diet, we have a tendency to lessen fat, less prone to several sorts of cancers. Our cholesterol can improve. When we have a tendency to're leaner and eating fewer animal product, then many different health and fitness problems are reduced. The incidence of Type II diabetes is reduced. Blood pressure falls into traditional ranges. When you are healthier, you're taking fewer medications. Even if you've got a prescription drug profit in your health plan, you're still saving cash with fewer co-payments on medications.

If you have a family history of high cholesterol or high blood pressure, then it's notably incumbent on you to revise your eating habits. Moving towards a a lot of vegetarian diet has been shown statistically to reduce the incidence of thus several of the diseases of industrialized countries. Vegetarians are statistically healthier than omnivorous persons; they're leaner and live longer.

Isn't it time to consider what you wish to be and to eat accordingly? Do you would like to be sluggish and fat? Do you wish the risk that goes with eating animal merchandise, with their high fat content? Or do you wish to look like and be what vegetarians are? Leaner and fitter with a extended anticipated lifespan. It's never too late to change what you're doing and increase your probabilities for a longer, fitter life.

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