Meat-Free Dietary Behavior

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Meat-free Dietary: Savior of beings on Earth?
As we all know, grilled steak is very tasty, and deep-fried fish is also a delicacy. These meals are tempting for us. Because of this, we consume 41.9 kilograms of meat per capita every year (ChartsBin statistics collector team, 2013), which means we have eaten around 185 pieces of 8-oz steaks every year (Donnelly, 2011). Yet, our interviewee Karly, specializing in nutritional biology, has mentioned that the World Health Organization classifies processed meat and red meat, which includes beef, veal, pork, etcetera, as “carcinogenic to humans” and “probably carcinogenic to humans” respectively (The International Agency for Research on Cancer of World Health Organization, 2015). Since then, vegetarianism …show more content…

As Vegetarian Society (n.d.) suggests, vegetarian diet is a dietary plan with “grains, pulses, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits with, or without, the use of dairy products and eggs”. Since vegetarian diet brings more benefits than harms to us, more people would like to follow it. Vegetarianism should be widely adopted by Hong Kong citizens in order to promote animal ethics, converse the environment and enhance the health status.
Animal Ethics
Adopting vegetarian diets would help promote animal ethics from several perspectives. Firstly, having vegetarian diet makes livestock become less demanded so that the feeding process would be more humane. Vegetarians think that it is cruel to kill animals as food. Our interviewee Martin, a vegetarian, has suggested that avoiding animals suffering from tortures is the main reason for him to adopt the vegetarian diet. Since he realizes that a cow is fed under poor conditions, he decides to adopt vegetarian diet. However, there are some voices against their opinion. They claim that most animals in …show more content…

Everybody knows that there are a myriad of fats and cholesterols in meat. Meats, especially red meat, increase the risk of getting non-infectious diseases such as cancers and coronary heart disease. A report shows that the corresponding increases in risk for eating meat were 18% and 21% for cardiovascular mortality, and 10% and 16% for cancer mortality (Pan A et al., 2012). In contrast, vegetarian diet can lower the risk of having non-infectious diseases. Nuts and whole grains, which are easily found in vegetarian meals, can improve cardiovascular health (“57 Health Benefits of Going Vegan”, n.d.) and prevent suffering from various cardiovascular diseases including cardiac arrhythmia and heart attack. Besides, having fresh fruits and crops can greatly reduce the chance of having abnormal health status. Apart from the non-infectious diseases above, diabetes, which is a chronic disease, is also one of the health concerns brought by having meat. “A cross-sectional report from the Adventist Health Study-2 showed vegans to have a 68% lower rate of diabetes than non-vegetarians.” (Norris, 2013). It shows that vegetarian diet can effectively lower the risk of having various kind of non-infectious diseases. Therefore, vegetarianism should be widely adopted in Hong