Is It Worth It to Be Vegan?

(Image via Good Housekeeping)

Matthew Lowther, Writer

Being vegan is a new trend that many people are starting to join. There are a lot of different reasons people become vegan. Some people want a healthier lifestyle, others think it’s not moral to eat animals, or some just want to be more environmentally friendly. These are all good arguments to become vegan, but they may not be as effective as they might seem. When it really comes down to it, it comes down to your opinion on if it is worth changing your whole diet, but are the outcomes of being vegan even all that effective?

Meat is a major source of protein in an average diet when someone cuts all that protein out of their diet at once they will start to get more tired easily and won’t be able to heal muscle as well since the protein we intake goes to the healing of the muscles. When muscles can’t properly they will be less able to grow and become stronger which makes a person weaker and less able to do physically demanding tasks. After a while the body won’t be able to function nearly as well as it would with protein in it and will start to crave meat as a way to get a high source into your diet, for some just drinking a few protein shakes would do it, others might have to continue to eat meat to get back into a healthy life.

Some people also believe that the production of most meat is bad for the environment and although that is not technically true there due to the mass production of meat, some companies turn to faster, mechanical production which adds air pollution from the carbon emissions released by those machines. When you get your meat fresh from a trusted farm that’s livestock is fed healthy food and isn’t harvested using lots of automated machinery it has a minimal carbon footprint.

When people think of the morality of eating meat is a somewhat controversial issue. Many people think that it is perfectly okay to eat meat, some people think that animals don’t have the same intelligence as us, don’t have personality, or they just taste good. Others think that animals deserve not to be eaten, a lot of the reasons are due to how animals are treated when made to be eaten and their “souls”, even some people don’t like eating “filthy animals”.

Being vegan is a choice you can have for any reason and is completely up to you if you want to take every step to decrease your carbon footprint or just want to see every animal happy and living a full, free life you might want to try and start eating fewer animal products. If you want to live a healthier and stronger life and don’t mind eating meat from animals you might feel a bit better about eating meat. It is really up to you to choose what you want to eat, you shouldn’t be told what to eat if you don’t feel that you want to change your lifestyle like that. Just try to live your life the way you want and eat as much (or as little) meat as you want.