1. Why Do People Become Vegetarians?

Nowadays the number of vegetarians has considerably increased, this phenomenon is mainly due to the emergence of different diseases that are contracted while eating meat. In fact, it started a few years ago with the mad cow disease, which was an illness that affected cows’ nervous system; and more recently there was the swine flu. In fact, there are more and more reasons that push people to stop eating meat and become vegetarians.

A. Health Reasons

Some people deliberately choose not to eat meat because an excessive consumption of meat can lead to some serious diseases such as cancer and circulatory system diseases. In addition, meat is also one of the main sources of cholesterol and most food poisoning are from animals therefore being a vegetarian helps avoiding all those health problems linked to meat. In addition,  it was recently proved that being a vegetarian also helps you live longer.

B. Save the Planet

Some people also choose to become vegetarians as raising a  livestock is a source of water pollution in the form of sewage and it also produces a lot of greenhouse gases that are extremely bad for the planet. Some people are also vegetarian for religious reasons, for instance in Buddhism eating meat is considered a bad thing for your karma. Some people are also vegetarian for psychological reasons, in fact they think that animals are beings just like us and deserve to live as long as possible. Actually, there are many other reasons why people choose to become vegetarians, we are now going to see what the diet of a vegetarian looks like.

2. Vegetarian Diets

A vegetarian diet is characterised by its focus on plants for food. A vegetarian person can eat any kind of fruit, vegetables, dried beans and peas, grains, seeds and nuts. But there are different types of vegetarianism as some vegetarians for instance eat both eggs and dairy foods they are called lacto-ovo vegetarians. Then we have another kind of vegetarianism which consists in eating plants and dairy foods and they are called lacto vegetarians.

3. Deficiency of Some Vitamins  

There are many vitamins that can’t be found in plants or that are in very small amounts in dairy foods and vegetarians have to find some ways of getting those vitamins. In fact, vegetarians mostly need to focus on including protein, iron, calcium, zinc and vitamin B12  in order to be sure of getting all the vitamins they need. One of the best ways of getting those vitamins is of course to buy vitamin B and other dietary supplements to avoid vitamin deficiency, as a lack of vitamin B12 for instance can trigger serious health problems.

4. Healthy Vegetarian Diets

We saw earlier that most people choose to become vegetarians for health reasons, as it helps avoiding different kind of diseases. However, have to be very careful and have a varied and balanced diet that allows them to have all the vitamins their body need. In addition, one of the advantages of being a vegetarian is that almost all vegetarians have amazing bodies as they only eat healthy food such as vegetables and plants.