Vegetarians International Voice for Animals

10 reasons to go veggie

1. You'll save the lives of 6 cows, 22 pigs, 30 sheep, 800 chickens, 50 turkeys, 15 ducks, 7 rabbits and half a ton of fish.

2. You'll help protect yourself against the most common killer diseases. An animal-based diet is high in saturated fat, animal protein and cholesterol which raise the level of cholesterol in the blood - the warning sign for heart disease and stroke. Vegetarians get up to 57 per cent less heart disease.

3. The National Cancer Institute state that eating vitamins A,C and E from fresh fruit and vegetables reduces cancers and heart disease. These vitamins even help keep your brain active in old age! None of these antioxidants are in meat.

4. A vegetarian diet provides all the nutrients you need for good health - so says the British Medical Association and US goverment.

5. There are virtually no laws to protect farm animals from cruelty.

6. Meat is an incredibly wasteful way of producing food. On average just to produce 1 kg of meat, 10kg of vegetable protein is used. That vegetable protein could be fed directly to people instead. This leads to starvation because people in the wealthy West use so many of the world's crops to feed their farm animals. And because the West has so much power it can insist that poorer countries grow food for the West's animals when they could be growing it for their own people.

7. If everyone in the world went vegetarian we could feed the whole world and more. If everyone ate meat we could not even feed half the world's population.

8. Almost all pigs are factory farmed. They are often in dark, barren, overcrowded pens and suffer from broken bones, abscesses, ruptured stomachs, pneumonia, meningitis, cuts and wounds which often kill the piglets because they are not cleaned.

9. Chickens are fed antibiotics every day to try to stop the spread of disease. Up to 100,000 are crammed in sheds. Four fifths have broken bones or deformed legs and feet by the time they are killed at just six weeks old.

10. Fishing is causing the ecological collapse of the oceans.

With the simple decision to stop eating meat and fish, you cease to play a part in this insanity. Go on be an eco-babe and go veggie today.