by Alfred Nylund

Created on: January 01, 2007   Last Updated: July 27, 2009

Becoming a vegetarian is a great way to get healthy, lose weight, spare animals the suffering of spending their lives packed into crates before being slaughtered, and avoid ingesting the hormones and antibiotics that the animals are generally pumped full of.

There is something important that many people new to vegetarianism neglect, however. It is vitally important that you replace the protein than once came from animal meat in your diet with other kinds of protein. This is especially true if you intend to raise your child as a vegetarian. If you do not intend to fully regulate and supplement your child's diet with protein from vegetarian sources, it is better to raise your child as a meat eater. You simply must attend to your child's special dietary needs as a growing vegetarian so that they grow and develop properly.

Next, there's the issue of animal cruelty. It's difficult to eat a chicken sandwich from a fast food joint when you stop to think about the dismal conditions that these animals live in prior to their deaths. They are crammed, dozen upon dozen, into crates, thrown around as though already packaged meat, and generally put through hell before being "processed" to put it mildly, killed and packaged to be blunt.

This is simply a fact. McDonald's cheeseburgers are delicious, and I wish I could eat them without baby cows wallowing in their own filth for their whole lives and having growths clipped off them with pliers, but that's how it works. This, for me, was a fact that got the better of me one day and I knew I had to stop contributing to that industry.

I love steak as much as the next guy, but considering the health benefits of vegetarianism and the moral issues involved with eating meat, I've got to recommend the way of the herbivore.

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