A vegan (vee-gun) is someone who, for various reasons, chooses to avoid using or consuming animal products of any kind. Veganism (also strict or pure vegetarianism) is a philosophy and lifestyle that seeks to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing, or any other purpose. The most popular reasons for becoming a vegan are concerns for animal rights, the environment, or human health, and spiritual or religious concerns.

Veganism, the natural extension of vegetarianism, is an integral component of a cruelty-free lifestyle.

Of particular concern are the practices involved in factory farming and animal testing, and the intensive use of land and other resources required for animal farming.

Origin

The word vegan was originally derived from “vegetarian” in 1944 when Elsie Shrigley and Donald Watson, frustrated that the term “vegetarianism” had come to include the eating of dairy products, founded the UK Vegan Society. They combined the first three and last two letters of vegetarian to form “vegan,” which they saw as “the beginning and end of vegetarian.” The British Vegan Society defines veganism in this way:

The word “veganism” denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude — as far as is possible and practical — all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Other vegan societies use similar definitions. Although these definitions exclude all animal products as non-vegan, some vegans consider the use of insect products such as honey or silk to be acceptable.

Why should I become a become a vegan?

Protect yourself

The consumption of animal fats and proteins has been linked to heart disease, colon and lung cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, kidney disease, hypertension, obesity, and a number of other debilitating conditions. Cows’ milk contains ideal amounts of fat and protein for young calves, but far too much for humans. And eggs are higher in cholesterol than any other food, making them a leading contributor to cardiovascular disease. The American Dietetic Association reports that vegetarian/vegan diets are associated with reduced risks for all of these conditions.

Vegan foods, such as whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans, are low in fat, contain no cholesterol, and are rich in fiber and nutrients. Vegans can get all the protein they need from legumes (e.g., beans, tofu, peanuts) and grains (e.g., rice, corn, whole wheat breads and pastas); calcium from broccoli, kale, collard greens, tofu, fortified juices and soymilks; iron from chickpeas, spinach, pinto beans, and soy products; and B12 from fortified foods or supplements.

With planning, a vegan diet can provide all the nutrients we were taught as schoolchildren came only from animal products.

Animal Concern

Every year, more than five billion farm animals are murdered in the United States, usually in modern day “factory farms”, where the animals are treated like disposable machines. There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. In this context, people prefer to avoid confronting the reality, erasing that brutal images from their minds, in order to keep eating eat with with a “clear” conscious.

Plus, many people believe that animals raised for food must be treated well because sick or dead animals would be of no use to agribusiness. This is not true.

The competition to produce inexpensive meat, eggs, and dairy products has led animal agribusiness to treat animals as objects and commodities. The worldwide trend is to replace small family farms with “factory farms”—large warehouses where animals are confined in crowded cages or pens or in restrictive stalls.

Furthermore, despite the common belief that drinking milk or eating eggs does not kill animals, commercially-raised dairy cows and egg-laying chickens, whether factory-farmed or “free range”, are slaughtered when their production rates decline. The same factory farm methods that are used to produce most meats are also used to produce most milk and eggs. These cows and chickens live their short lives caged, drugged, mutilated, and deprived of their most basic freedoms.

Today’s farms are not like the ones most of us learned about in school; they are mechanized factories where an animal’s welfare is of little concern compared to profit. Veganism emerges as the lifestyle most consistent with the philosophy that animals are not ours to use.

Vegan organizations maintain that animals have certain rights, and as such is not ethical for humans to use animals in ways that infringe those rights. Besides factory farming, practices seen as cruel to animals also include animal testing, and groups which display animals for entertainment, such as circuses, rodeos and zoos.

Protect Our Environment

Animal agriculture takes a devastating toll on the earth. It is an inefficient way of producing food, since feed for farm animals requires land, water, fertilizer, and other resources that could otherwise have been used directly for producing human food.

Veganism consumes less resources and causes less environmental damage than an animal-based diet. Animal agriculture is linked to climate change, water pollution, land degradation, and a decline in biodiversity. Additionally, an animal-based diet uses more land, water, and energy than a vegan diet.

Animal waste from massive feedlots and factory farms is a leading cause of pollution in our groundwater and rivers. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has linked4_24_2007leafwater.jpgIn a time when Al Gore is animal agriculture to a number of other environmental problems, including: contamination of aquatic ecosystems, soil, and drinking water by manure, pesticides, and fertilizers; acid rain from ammonia emissions; greenhouse gas production; and depletion of aquifers for irrigation.

In a time when population pressures have become an increasing stress on the environment, there are additional arguments for a vegan diet. The United Nations has reported that a vegan diet can feed many more people than an animal-based diet. For instance, projections have estimated that the 1992 food supply could have fed about 6.3 billion people on a purely vegetarian diet, 4.2 billion people on a 85% vegetarian diet, or 3.2 billion people on a 75% vegetarian diet.

Vegans and Health, pros and cons

Benefits

Certain widespread diets (such as the standard American diet, which is high in fat and low in fiber and green vegetables) are detrimental to health, and a vegan diet thus represents an improvement, in part because vegan diets are often high enough in fruit and vegetables to meet or exceed the recommended fruit and vegetable intakes. Conversely, studies in Japan found that increased consumption of some animal products coincided with a decrease in risk for some forms of cerebrovascular disease and stroke mortality.

Some vegans feel additional health benefits are gained by eating food with minimal levels of substances such as growth hormones and antibiotics, which are often given to intensively farmed animals in countries where this is legal. Because they are similar to human hormones, growth-promoters such as anabolic steroids that are used in cattle farming in America may affect fetal and childhood development. Due to this uncertainty, the use of such growth promoters is illegal in the European community.

Benefits of vegetarian diets are sometimes also valid for strict vegan diets: according to the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada, diets that avoid meat tend to have lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, and higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, and phytochemicals. People who avoid meat are reported to have lower body mass indices than those following the average Canadian diet; from this follows lower death rates from ischemic heart disease; lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.
The American Dietetic Association states that well-planned vegan diets can also be appropriate for life cycles requiring high nutritional intake such as pregnancy, lactation, childhood, and adolescence.

A pilot study at Georgetown University on 2005 suggested that a vegan diet can reduce blood cholesterol in people with type 2 diabetes, as well as significantly reduce the complications of this disease.

Vegan athletes compete in a variety of sports, including power lifting, bodybuilding, martial arts, and long distance running. Multiple Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis has stated that he became vegan in 1990 and achieved his “best year of track competition” in 1991 when he ate a vegan diet.

Precautions

Specific nutrients

The American Dietetic Association has said that “appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.” Poorly planned vegan diets, however, increase the risk of deficiency in nutrients such as vitamin B12, vitamin D, calcium, iodine and omega-3 fatty acids. These deficiencies have potential consequences, including anemia, rickets and cretinism in children, and osteomalacia and hyperthyroidism in adults.

Vitamin B12

The Vegan Society and Vegan Outreach, and others, recommend that vegans either consistently eat foods fortified with B12 or take a B12 supplement. Deficiencies in Vitamin B12, a bacterial product that cannot be reliably found in plant foods, can have serious health consequences, including anemia and neurodegenerative disease. The body can reabsorb B12 from the bile, which means it may take up to five years to exhaust the body’s reserves of the vitamin. However it is still possible to suffer from mild deficiency and if a person has not eaten more than the daily needed amount of B12 over a long period before becoming a vegan then they may not have built up any significant store of the vitamin.

In a 2002 laboratory study, more of the strict vegan participants’ B12 and iron levels were compromised than those of lacto- or lacto-ovo-vegetarian participants. As of 2005, no food in Europe or the U.S. had been tested for lowering MMA levels, the gold standard for determining B12 activity.

A study, published in the June 1 2007 issue of Cancer Research, suggests that higher dietary intakes of B6, B9, and B12 are associated with reduced rates of pancreatic cancer for people at or below normal body weight.

Calcium

A 5.2 year study, released in February 2007 by Oxford, showed that vegans have an increased risk of bone fractures over both meat eaters and vegetarians, likely due to lower dietary calcium intake, and that vegans consuming more than the UK’s estimated average requirements for calcium of 525 mg/day had risk of bone fractures similar to other groups.

It is recommended that vegans eat three servings per day of a high calcium food, such as fortified soy milk, and take a calcium supplement as necessary; although recent research suggests that dietary calcium is better than supplements, at least for women. Fortified soy milk can also substitute for milk’s common role as a source of vitamin D (another nutrient important for bone formation, commonly added to commercial milk). Adequate amounts of vitamin D may also be obtained by spending 15 to 30 minutes every few days in the sunlight, but this may be difficult for vegans in areas with low levels of sunlight during winter.

Iodine

Naturally dietary iodine is available from marine foods, but adequate marine foods are not always available to or consumed by people worldwide. To ensure sufficient iodine is consumed by their citizens, iodized salt is common public policy in most countries (including China, India, and the United States). There is, however, a risk of iodine deficiency for vegans in countries which instead use animal-based methods of iodine supplementation – in Britain and Ireland the major source of iodine is the milk produced by cattle, which are given iodine-enriched feed. Iodine deficiency can cause hypothyroidism leading to tiredness, skin problems, tingling sensations and elevated cholesterol. Because of this, the British Vegan Society recommends iodine supplementation, noting that iodine can be readily obtained from kelp. They suggest that one or two kelp tablets a week is sufficient.

Pregnancies and children

According to the US National Institute of Health, “with appropriate food choices, vegan diets can be adequate for children at all ages.” Dr. Benjamin Spock has said, “Children who grow up getting their nutrition from plant foods rather than meats have a tremendous health advantage. They are less likely to develop weight problems, diabetes, high blood pressure and some forms of cancer.” The American Dietetic Association also considers well-planned vegan diets “appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy and lactation,” but recommends that vegan mothers supplement for iron, vitamin D, and vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 deficiency in lactating vegetarian mothers has been linked to deficiencies and neurological disorders in their children. Some research suggests that the essential omega-3 fatty acid a-linolenic acid and its derivatives should also be supplemented in pregnant and lactating vegan mothers, since they are very low in most vegan diets, and the metabolically related docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) is essential to the developing visual system. Vegan diet has also been associated with low birth weight. A 2006 study found that vegan mothers are five times less likely to have twins than those who eat animal products.

In the last decade, a poorly planned vegan diet has been associated with several cases of severe infant malnutrition, and more rarely, with fatalities. The subsequent criminal conviction of the parents, ranging from assault to felony murder, has raised some notable criticism of vegan diets for children. Dr. Amy Lanou, an expert witness for the prosecution in the case of Crown Shakur, addressed the criticism, saying “(Crown) was not killed by a vegan diet… The real problem was that he was not given enough food of any sort.”

Eating disorders

The American Dietetic Association found that vegetarian diets may be more common among adolescents with eating disorders than in the general adolescent population, and that professionals should be aware of adolescents who limit the food choices and exhibit symptoms of eating disorders. The ADA indicates that the evidence suggests that the adoption of a vegetarian diet does not lead to eating disorders, but “vegetarian diets may be selected to camouflage an existing eating disorder.”

Veganism Vs. Vegetarianism

A few lines that help to understand these concepts:

  • Whereas Vegans shun all animal products, Vegetarians do not.
  • Lacto-Ovo-Vegetarians (vegetarianism in its most common form in Western societies) eat eggs and dairy products.
  • Lacto-Vegetarians are common throughout India in particular. They eat dairy products, but refuse eggs.
  • Ovo-Vegetarians accept eggs but refuse dairy products. This is a relatively uncommon form of vegetarian.
  • Other groups include individuals who refuse all red meat, but eat poultry and fish/seafood, and individuals who refuse meat and poultry but eat fish/seafood. Neither group can rightfully be labeled Vegetarian, and must be categorized as a subset of the omnivorous diet.

Sources: Vegan Action, Vegan Outreach, Wikipedia

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