Positive Effects of a Vegan Diet

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The American Vegan Society defines veganism as living solely on plant products, which excludes any type of flesh, fish, fowl, animal milk, dairy products, eggs, honey, and all other foods of animal origin (Stepaniak 19). There has been much debate about whether or not a vegan diet is a healthy way to live. Many argue that meat is necessary to get nutrients that are hard to find in other food sources. However, the negative effects, such as obesity and high cholesterol, found in animal product diets highly outweigh the few amounts of possible negative effects of a vegan diet. The vegan diet is beneficial for animals, human health, the environment, and ultimately the best diet for the world. If everyone ate a vegan diet, inhumane animal practices in the animal agriculture industry would cease to exist. As Peter Park put it in “The Globalization of Animal Welfare”, “more animals in more places are confined in restrictive conditions utterly unlike their natural environments and are pushed beyond their physiological limits to produce ever-greater numbers of eggs, gallons of milk, and pounds of flesh.” To define what a “restrictive” condition is like, Park goes on to describe what egg-laying hens live like. He talks about battery cages that are, “so small that even if there were just one hen in each cage, she would be unable to fully stretch and flap her wings -- and there are often at least four, if not more, hens per cage” (10-14). Because there are many animals condensed in small areas, the workers mutilate them to prevent them from hurting each other. They “sear off portions of [chicken’s] beaks ” and “use pliers to break off the ends of teeth [on pigs]” without giving either any type of anesthesia or pain killers (Park 12-13). These are not the worst of the inhumane acts. After animals live like this to grow large enough to be slaughtered for their meat, there is an

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