I love Being Vegan. Here’s Why! Benefits, Benefits, Benefits!

Maybe you’ve been wanting to pursue a cruelty-free lifestyle. Maybe you’re trying to reduce your carbon footprint. Maybe you want an alternative to factory farming, tainted food, and a food-production system out of balance—or maybe you just want to be healthier and lose weight. For all of these, going vegan might be the path for you.

Vegans have made a conscious choice to eliminate all sources of animal products in their life, from shoe leather to butterfat to hot dogs. Instead, through a carefully-designed diet, they get all of their required protein and all necessary clothing through plants. It’s a kinder life, a gentler life, and a much more sustainable life. It’s also a life with a lot fewer calories and a lot more vitamins and antioxidants.

The first and most basic benefit of veganism is health. People who eat a vegan diet—no meat or fish, no eggs, no cheese, no milk—have less heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Their blood pressure is lower, as is their cholesterol level. They have less colon cancer, prostate cancer, and diabetes, and the way they achieve this better health is simple: fruits and vegetables. Vegans are far more likely to be getting more of their daily recommended allowance of fiber, magnesium, potassium, folates, and the antioxidants vitamin C and vitamin E; they’re also taking in far less of the unhealthy saturated fats, salt, and sugars that typify the standard American diet.

Many vegans supplement their diet with a variety of soy products and other protein alternatives, like soy milk, soy burgers, tofu, and textured vegetable protein. Soy products are as protein-rich as meat and dairy products, but contain no cholesterol, no saturated fat, and no galactose, the sugar that causes lactose intolerance.

Along with the health benefits of the vegan way of life is an obvious side benefit: vegans typically weigh less than either vegetarians or meat eaters. The recent widely-praised book by Mark Bittman, Food Matters, describes how he lost 35 pounds just by going vegan for two meals a day. Imagine how much weight you could lose by eliminating animal products altogether!

Vegan food is also much cheaper than a meat-heavy diet. Everyone knows that shopping the produce aisle is far cheaper than shopping the meat and cheese departments; what’s more, vegan milk and protein alternatives, like Silk Soymilk or White Mountain Tofu, are the same price or cheaper than their animal originals.

Finally, vegans can sleep better at night, knowing that their lifestyle is far easier on the planet than that of animal eaters. Animal farming is widely acknowledged to be unsustainable; the earth simply cannot produce enough cows, sheep, chickens, and goats to feed a world population of over six billion. Globally, animal agriculture has been shown to contribute to global warming, deforestation, species loss, and water pollution. Why continue to be a part of that, when by simply changing how you eat, you can help be part of the solution?

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