Why Vegan?

It has become obvious that the human organism was not design to consume animal products as a primary source of nutrition. It has also become apparent that the most important thing that one can do for the environment is to go vegan. This is much much more than some hippie doctrine or a fad diet; and though for some of you it may seem extreme it is my intent to help you realize how extremely out of balance our standard American diet (aka: the SAD diet) and lifestyle really is.



Number 1 Reason to be Vegan: STOP GLOBAL WARMING!
You want to be a part of the solution right? You want to live in a way that is sustainable and peaceful right? The fact is that the number one cause of global warming in not CO2! The most potent green house gases that are the cause of the accelerated warming on the planet are excess methane and NOx (nitrogen oxides) from animal agriculture. In a 414 page report by a Heather Moors United Nations Report entitled "Livestock's Long Shadow" concluded that livestock is "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." According to this report animal production for food contributes more green-house gases than all the cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes in the world combined. This industry is not only one of the largest producers of CO2 emissions, it is the single largest producers of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions. NOx are ~300 times more potent in term of green-house effects than CO2. Meat, egg, and dairy industries account for 65% of the world's total NOx emissions.

At the University of Chicago researchers, Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, demonstrated that switching to a vegan diet was more effective in mitigating global warming than switching from a standard American car to a Prius. They also found that a typical U.S. meat eater generates ~1.5 tons more CO2 per person per year than a vegan does.

Number 2 Reason to be Vegan: Water
Almost half of the water used in this country is wasted between watering the crops to feed livestock, providing drinking water for the billions of animals each year, cleaning up the waste in factory farms, transport trucks, and slaughterhouses. This places an uneccisary and serious strain on the world's dwindling and precious water supply.

2500 gal. of H2O = 1 pound of meat vs. 25 gal. = 1 pound wheat

4000+ gal./day for a meat eating diet vs. 300 gal./day for a vegan diet

The EPA has reported that factory farms pollute our water more than all other industries combined! Animals raised for meat create ~130 times more shit than the entire human population - 87,000 lbs. per second! All of this will ultimately find it's way into our soil, streams and rivers, and eventually in our showers and drinking water. People are getting sick and evening dying in staggering numbers in locations where livestock are concentrated.

Number 3 Reason to be Vegan: Land and Soil

3 1/4 acre needed to produce food for a meat vs. 1/6 acres for a vegan diet. 55 square feet of tropical rain forest are demolished to produce just 1 quarter-pound hamburger. More than 2.9 million acres of Amazon rain forest were destroyed between 2005-2006 in order to grow food for chickens and other farmed animals. More than 260 million acres in the U.S. have been cleared to create crop land to grow grain to feed farmed animals.

I don't currently have any statistic on top soil loss and depletion though I know from my background in environmental science that this is a serious issue created by modern conventional monoculture farming practices that don't create living soil; in fact they do just the opposite. Deforestation also leads to desertification which contributes to massive top loss and degradation.

Number 4 Reason to be Vegan: Vibrant Human Health

In my experience transitioning from a meat eating diet, to a vegetarian diet, to vegan, and now to raw vegan I have found that it has had the most profound influence on all aspects of my physical, mental, and spiritual health. It is so obvious to me now that the human body was designed to eat in this way. For instance: we have the smallest and dullest canine teeth of all the primates, our digestive tract is extremely long and designed to dehydrate masticated fruit and vegetable matter (where as carnivorous animals have a much smaller GI tract because meat begins to rot much faster then vegetable matter and thus needs to be expelled before it begin to toxify the system). I feel lighter, stronger, and have more energy and mental clarity then ever before. I have become more and more spiritual as this transition has taken place, and feel the Divine life-force energy moving through me more and more (I will explain how and why this is possible in my next post: "Spiritual Nutrition and Living Food"). Overall I am enthusiastic about life and my place in the universe; I am happy and content for no other reason than being awake and aware here now.

In a book The China Study, Dr. T. Colin Campbell clearly lays our his massive study of epidemiology in China as well as his laboratory tests with animal protein. Coming form a background in beef production Campbell had set out to prove definitively that animal protein was the optimal food for life; he found precisely the opposite. In his lab study with mice he was literally able to turn on and off cancer in the mice by switch from an animal protein (casin, which is in dairy) to a vegetable source of protein. His statistical analysis of death and disease in Chinese showed clearly that where people were affluent enough to afford meat as a regular part of there diet they were dying from cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. These chronic degenerative diseases (which are some of the leading causes of death in the U.S.) were not present in more rural, poor regions of China where they can not afford animal products and eat primary plant based diet.

Check it for yourself: http://www.thechinastudy.com/about.html

Number 5 Reason to be Vegan: Peace and Compassion

• Peace with the Body: As explained above, a live-food vegan diet is the optimal diet for the human organism. We can think of disease in the body as chaos, disorder, and entropy; when one converts to a diet that is in coherence with nature we restore order and health to the body. In this sense we make peace with our bodies.
• Peace with the Mind: As mentioned above meat contains uric acid which is a agitating stimulant. When we choose to love ourselves enough to want to heal our bodies and the planet we are relieved of the sub-conscious and conscious guilt of being apart of what we are calling hear a the Tree the Culture of Death; this is a world view that treats animal and human life as economic commodities as opposed to living beings with a soul that we are ultimately connected. I have noticed profound changes in the clarity of my mind, my intuition, and my ability to focus since going vegan. It is much easier to quiet the mind in meditation which is surely part of the reason that most spiritual communities prescribe a vegetarian diet.
• Peace with the Family: When we become healthy, calm, and inspired it effects those around us. You are offering the invitation to those around you to emulate what your are doing. Your heightened levels of peace and well-being will be contagious and you will begin to see what a gift your presence and energy will be to those around you.
• Peace with the Community: By moving to an plant based diet you are almost forced to begin connecting to where your food comes from in a way that perhaps you never have. Farmer's markets, local produce, and the people that bring these things to you become a regular part of your experience. You will have faces and families that are associated to your food and you can eat with the joy that you are supporting them. As a healthier and more vibrant human you will also be more of an asset to the community in which you are living.
• Peace with Culture: Indigenous cultures around the world are being displaced and destroyed by large scale conventional agriculture and meat production. Genetically modified crops, most of which are grown to feed livestock, are contaminating ancient strains of plants that have been pass on through generations and are important not only as natural sources of food, but also as important parts of the cultural heritage of the peoples who have cultivated and kept them for hundreds of years. Large agro-business is putting small farmers out of business and forcing peoples who have been farmers for generations to find new lives and ways to support themselves. These cultures have the right to exist and thrive; when we stop supporting meat production we make this statement clearly with our actions.
• Peace with the Living Planet: We are all one. Our fellow humans, the animals, the plants, the wind, water, and land are all intimately interconnected and affected by each other. I have told you about the overall environmental catastrophe that the meat industry is, but now lets talk about the animals. The word ahimsa means non-violence, or compassion, in Sanskrit; a vegan diet has been prescribed for thousands of years by spiritual traditions all over the world that have recognized that killing another sentient being for any reason should be avoided. When a cow is slaughtered it is terrified in the moments before its death. That fear is correlated with a release of large amount of adrenaline in the blood of that animal which when cosumed by a human is toxic. Spiritually and vibrationally speaking when you eat slaughtered animals you take in their terror and pain. You are consuming death with the false sense that it is giving you life. The same concept applies when one consumes the milk from animals that have been pumped with horomes and kept impregnated forcing them to produce more milk than it would under normal circumstances. 80% of the antibiotic that are created go into livestock at would not servive the discusting conditions they're subject to without them. 25 billion animals are slaughter every year. When we begin to see that we are consuming the products of sick, mistreated, and tortured animals it should come as no surprise that we have become a very sick, violent, depressed, and troubled society.

You are begining to see that there is no good reason to still be consuming animal products in this day and age. We have the dietary technologies to live vibrantly on vegan sources, and it has been proven that meat and diary consumption is hazardous to our health and the planet. Nasa scientist Dr. James Hansen has shown that methane, not CO2, is the primary cause of global warming. This means that even if you drive a gas guzzling SUV you will have a greater influence on the improvement of global warming then if you eat meat and drive a Prius. And while CO2 stays in the atmoshpere for anywhere between 100 and 10,000 years, methane only persists for 9 to 15 years; which means that if the whole world went vegan we could reverse global warming in only about 10 years. That's exciting news! When Al Gore was asked about this he said that "the politics are too heavy." We need to take our health and our planet into our own hands and discontinue this Culture of Death that is putting our health and freedom at risk. Go vegan for your body, your mind, your family, communty, and planet. The time is now. I hope to encourage, inspire, and educate you in this transition toward world peace and health.

Peace-Love-Bliss

Baba