{"id":25,"date":"2010-09-18T21:24:15","date_gmt":"2010-09-18T21:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/justiceforanimals.co.za\/vabackup\/?p=25"},"modified":"2010-09-18T21:24:15","modified_gmt":"2010-09-18T21:24:15","slug":"reasons-to-become-a-vegan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/?p=25","title":{"rendered":"Reasons to become a Vegan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color:green;\"><strong>Animal Rights<\/strong><\/span> \u2013 many people are vegan  because they respect animals and believe in animal rights.  They see it  as a way of doing their share to reduce animal suffering and abuse.   Being vegan is the most powerful and practical statement anyone can make  against the oppression and exploitation of animals, wild and domestic.<br \/>\n<span style=\"color:green;\"><strong>Environmental<\/strong><\/span> \u2013  Vast tracts of land are needed to graze the world\u2019s 1.25 billion cattle  alone.  Destruction of natural vegetation, including rain forests, and  massive erosion of topsoil are just two of the many serious  environmental problems associated with livestock grazing.<br \/>\nMeat and leather production also impacts very  negatively on water supplies and causes serious pollution of natural  waterways which leads to the die-off of aquatic ecosystems.  Leather and  hide processing uses a lot of environmentally harmful chemicals which  end up in rivers, streams and lakes, making the water unfit for  consumption and causing the death of fish and other animals using that  water.<br \/>\nWhereas it takes 15000 litres of water to produce  food for a meat eater for one day, and 5000 litres of water to produce  food for a vegetarian for one day, it requires only 1500 litres of water  to produce food for a vegan for a day.<br \/>\nBillions of cattle, sheep and other ruminating  livestock animals produce vast quantities of methane gas that is a major  contributing factor in global warming (greenhouse effect).<br \/>\n<span style=\"color:green;\"><strong>Human Health<\/strong><\/span> \u2013  People who do not consume meat and other animal products such as dairy  and eggs are generally much healthier and live longer than those who do.   Vegans have a far lower incidence of cancer, heart disease, high blood  pressure, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, strokes and many other common  diseases associated with consuming animal protein.<br \/>\nVegans rarely if ever suffer from food poisoning,  and spare their bodies the chemicals, growth stimulants and antibiotics  commonly found in the animal products that non-vegans so readily  consume.<br \/>\n<span style=\"color:green;\"><strong>World Hunger<\/strong><\/span> \u2013  Almost a billion people across the world suffer from starvation or acute  food shortage every day, and it is estimated that around 60 million of  these people die each year.  In a world that produces more than enough  food to literally eradicate starvation, it is a crime that this  situation should prevail.<br \/>\nVast amounts of the world\u2019s crop production,  which includes just under 40% of the grain produced, is fed to animals  which then get slaughtered to be eaten by a relatively small number of  humans who can afford meat.  Grain that is fed to livestock in the USA  alone amounts to 135 million tons annually and could feed 400 million  vegans.<br \/>\nBetween 10 and 20 times more people can be fed on  a plant based diet than on a meat based diet.  There is no good reason  why anyone, anywhere in the world should starve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Animal Rights \u2013 many people are vegan because they respect animals and believe in animal rights. They see it as<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reasons-to-be-vegan","category-veganism"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vegananimal.nl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}