Why Plant-Based Diets?
There are many reasons to choose a plant-based diet and lifestyle, including promoting better health, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and social justice. No matter what your reason is, we're glad you're here!
Why Veganism is Important: 30 Reasons to Go Vegan
24 Reasons to Go Vegan in 2024
Health
Decades of nutritional research have established that a whole foods, plant-based diet is optimal for human health:
- Eating less meat and more plant-based foods, such as vegetables, beans, and nuts, can improve heart health and reduce the risk of heart disease
- Skipping even a half serving of meat every day and replacing it with a plant protein like beans or tofu can decrease your risk of getting type 2 diabetes
- Substituting plant-based foods for meat can help you maintain a healthy weight
- Cutting back on red and processed meat and eating more plant-based foods can promote kidney health
- Beans, nuts, soy, and other vegetables can give you all the protein you need in one day
Animal Welfare
A plant-based diet is a compassionate diet that reduces animal suffering and supports wildlife health. Abstaining from meat, fish, dairy and eggs directly decreases the demand for animal farming–a system of cruel, inhumane practices:
- Not long after drawing their first breath, animals raised for food are routinely mutilated in attempts to make them “fit” a cruel and unnatural system. Turkeys’ toes are cut. The tips of chickens’ sensitive beaks are seared off. Calves’ horn tissue is burned out of their skulls. And piglets’ tails are cut off through the bone. All without any pain relief.
- For most of her life, a mother pig is confined to a cage so small she can’t turn around. She can’t properly interact with her babies, or intervene as they cry out in pain from having their bodies mutilated.
- Dairy cows are kept almost continually pregnant in order to produce milk. Year on year their newborn calves are torn away, leaving mother cows to bellow for their missing babies, sometimes for days.
- Every year, millions of day-old male chicks are gassed or shredded alive—simply because they’re of no use to the egg industry. Piglets who don’t grow fast enough are routinely swung by their back legs and slammed onto concrete, at times in front of their mothers and siblings.
By omitting animal products, you gain peace of mind while promoting kindness and respect for all living beings.
Environmental Sustainability
Eating more plant-based foods is one of the most effective actions individuals in countries with high meat consumption can take to reduce the world’s eco-footprint:
- The meat industry is the most significant driver of deforestation
- Livestock production uses 75% of the earth’s agricultural land and is the biggest human contributor to species decline.
- Livestock production creates more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector – all the cars, trucks, planes, and trains in the world – combined!
- If everyone in New York City chose a (soy) veggie burger instead of a ¼ lb. beef burger for Meatless Monday, it would save enough water to fill 79 million bathtubs of water.
- Swapping out red meat and dairy one day a week for plant-based foods reduces climate change causing emissions more than eating locally every day.
Unlike animal agriculture, plant-based eating reduces greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, land degradation, water usage, and helps preserve biodiversity, soil health, and natural habitats.
Social Justice
Human health equity, safer labor practices and environmental justice are promoted when choosing a plant-based diet:
- Factory farms and slaughterhouses tend to employ a large number of workers from marginalized communities. Slaughterhouse workers, in particular, are predominantly people of color living in low-income communities, and a significant number are undocumented immigrants. Poverty and fear of deportation make them vulnerable to exploitation and to be treated as if they are disposable. Threats of termination or, in many cases, deportation, discourage workers from reporting safety concerns, injuries, illness, animal abuse, and other serious issues.
- Slaughterhouse workers must perform repetitive motions for hours on end, wield industrial saws and sharp knives, and confront the violence of turning thousands of terrified animals into carcasses each day at a break-neck speed. The Food Chain Workers Alliance reports that 65 percent of meatpacking and food processing workers often experience injuries ranging from lacerations to the loss of limbs.
- Factory farms bring stench and pollution to their neighbors, depressing property values and destroying rural communities. Instead of good jobs, they bring pest infestations and cesspools of waste, destroying the quality of life in their neighborhoods. It is often those in agricultural and poorer communities who are left with no choice but to continue living near factory farms.