It's more important than ever to consider how our lifestyle and diet is affecting the world around us. From the food we eat to the clothes we wear; how we choose to live our lives has a huge impact on other people, wildlife, and their habitat.
Eating a plant-based diet is the most environmentally-friendly diet. Eliminating meat (including fish) and dairy from our plates is the single biggest way we can reduce our impact. Meat and dairy produce is fuelling global warming and the UN have said switching to a plant-based diet will help the climate crisis. It's time we started changing our habits. Adopting a vegan lifestyle enables us to extend our kindness and compassion to those around use to include non-human animals as well as people and the planet.
Going vegan is something we should all be considering, if you can; and if you can't go vegan, there are still plenty of ways you can make a difference by going cruelty-free.
Save Money
No one, not even vegans, live on a diet of just beans and rice, which would undoubtedly be a very cheap diet! Specialist vegan foods can be more expensive than their meat-based counterparts but if you opt for lentils or beans instead of meat, you'll save significant money since plant-based whole foods are far cheaper than animal products. Specialty foods aren’t imperative to your health; there's no need to switch meat out for expensive plant-based alternatives. Staples, like rice, potatoes, beans, lentils, and oats, are both affordable, nutritious, and most likely already in your cupboards. Eating plant-based is an easy way to save some extra money. Need more tips? This is how you can go vegan on a budget.
Protect Your Health
It's certainly not a cure all for all health issues but studies have shown eating a varied diet rich in plant-based foods leads to fewer health problems and can even alleviate, reverse, or cure numerous health issues including heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and various types of cancer. A plant-based diet can also result in better skin and hair if you're eating more natural antioxidants such as Vitamin A, C, and E, and none of the hormones that come from consuming animal products or the microplastics found in seafood. If everyone went vegan, we'd see a global mortality reduction of 6-10%; a clear indicator that a plant-based diet can be one of the healthiest, which is appropriate and nutritionally-adequate for everyone from babies to adults, as well as during pregnancy and older age.
Experiment With Food
While a plant-based diet removes a select few ingredients, it's often an omnivorous diet that ends up being less varied. People tend to stick to eating a slight variation of similar dishes over and over, all of which include the same two or three meats or dairy products; especially in the UK where 'meat and two veg' is traditional. Eating plant-based often results in a varied diet and better cooking skills as you pay more attention to what you're eating and how it's nourishing your body. Start cooking plant-based recipes and you'll open yourself up to a whole range of ingredients you've never tried before. These plant-based cookbooks are a good place to start.
Protect The Environment
Our personal choices won’t directly reverse environmental damage or stop climate change but collectively they will. Meat and dairy production is responsible for 60% of agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions; meat consumption contributes to deforestation and the loss of valuable ecosystems, which is one of the primary causes for mass extinction of wildlife. Switching to a plant-based diet will lower our carbon footprint and greenhouse gas emissions, and free up wild land lost to agriculture. Even the very lowest impact animal products (such as buying local, grass fed meat) still cause far more environmental damage than the least sustainable plant-based foods. So even if you switched from a diet of eating only local pasture-raised meat and dairy to a diet of packaged plant-based foods, you'd still be significantly reducing your environmental impact.
Show Kindness and Compassion
Non-human animals are sentient beings capable of feeling a range of emotions. We know this because we acknowledge these traits in our pets who aren't all that different from the animals we eat. Very few of us would say we support animal cruelty yet that's exactly what we're doing when we choose to eat, wear, or use animals. 150 billion animals are slaughtered every year, each and every one of those animals has the ability to feel pain and suffering. For many of us, choosing a plant-based diet would be possible and not too difficult. Adopting a vegan lifestyle extends our kindness and compassion to both human non-human animals to protect them against unnecessary harm.
