Vegetarianism is the fastest growing trend in the developed world. Here are 21 reasons why you should think about turning green too.
* Avoiding meat is one of the best and simplest ways to cut down your fat consumption. Modern farm animals are deliberately fattened up to increase profits. Eating fatty meat increases your chances of having a heart attack or developing cancer.
* Every minute of every working day, thousands of animals are killed in slaughter-houses. Pain and misery are common. In the US alone, 500,000 animals are killed for meat every hour.
* There are millions of cases of food poisoning recorded every year. The vast majority are caused by eating meat.
* Meat contains absolutely nothing - no proteins, vitamins or minerals - that the human body cannot obtain perfectly happily from a vegetarian diet.
* African countries - where millions are starving to death - export grain to the developed world so that animals can be fattened for our dining tables.
* 'Meat' can include the tail, head, feet, rectum and spinal cord of an animal.
* A sausage can contain ground up intestines. How can anyone be sure that the intestines are empty when they are ground up? Do you really want to eat the content of a pig's intestines?
* If we eat the plants we grow instead of feeding them to animals, the world's food shortage will disappear virtually overnight. Remember that 100 acres of land will produce enough beef for 20 people but enough wheat to feed 240 people.
* Every day, tens of millions of one-day-old male chicks are killed because they will not be able to lay eggs. There are no rules about how this mass slaughter takes place. Some are crushed or suffocated to death. Many are used for fertiliser or fed to other animals.
* Animals who die for your dinner table die alone, in terror, in sadness and in pain. The killing is merciless and inhumane.
* It's must easier to become (and stay) slim if you are a vegetarian. (By 'slim', I do not mean 'abnormally slender' or 'underweight' but rather, an absense of excess weight!)
* Half the rainforests in the world have been destroyed to clear ground to graze cattle to make beefburgers. The burning of the forests contributes 20% of all green-house gases. Roughtly 1,000 species a year become extinct because of the destruction of the rainforests. Approximately 60 million people a year die of starvation. All those lives could be saved because those people could eat grain used to fatten cattle and other farm animals - if Americans ate 10% less meat.
* The world's fresh water shortage is being made worse by animal farming. And meat producers are the biggest polluters of water. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of meat. If the US meat industry wasn't supported by the taxpayer paying a large proportion of its water costs, then hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound.
* If you eat meat, you are consuming hormones that were fed to the animals. No one knows what effect those hormones will have on your health. In some parts of the world, as many as one on four hamburgers contain growth hormones that were originally given to cattle.
* The following diseases are commoner among meat eaters: anaemia, appendicitis, arthritis, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, cancer of the prostrate, constipation, diabetes, gallstones, gout, high blood pressure, indigestion, obesity, piles, strokes and varicose veins. Lifelong vegetarians visit hospital 22% less often than meat eaters and for shorter stays. Vegetarians have a 20% lower blood cholestrol level than meat eaters and this reduces heart attack and cancer risks considerably.
* Some farmers use tranquillisers to keep animals calm. Other routinely use antibiotics to starve off infection. When you eat meat you are eating those drugs. In America, 55% of all antibiotics are fed to animals and the percentage of staphylococci infections resistant to penicillin went up from 14% in 1960 to 91% in 1988.
* In a lifetime, the average meat eater will consumer 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and turkeys. Do you want that much carnage on your conscience?
* Animals suffer from pain and fear just as much as you do. How would you like to spend your last hours locked in a truck, packed into a cage with hundreds of other terrified animal and then cruelly pushed into a blood soaked death chamber. Anyone who eats meat condones and supports the way animals are treated.
* Animals which are a year old are often far more rational - and capable of logical thought - than six week old babies. Pigs and sheep are far more intelligent than small children. Eating dead animals is barbaric.
* Vegetarians are fitter than meat eaters. many of the world's most successful athletes are vegetarian.
