People often say:
- Human beings are omnivore.
- Non-veg is tastier than veg food.
- Only-veg leads to protein deficiency.
- Plants have life and so killing them is as violent as killing animals.
However, the scientific facts are contrary to the above beliefs. Let us try to answer a few specific relevant questions in this regard.
Question 1: Will I get enough nutrition from vegetarian sources?
Answer: Out of total 23 amino acids, 9 are essential, namely, phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine, leucine, isoleucine, lysine, and histidine. According to US Food and Drug Administration (UFDA), any one of soy, lentils (daal) and milk contain all essential amino acids, what to speak of combination diet of vegetables!
Moreover, Dennis Gordon, M.Ed., R.D., establishes that combination diet is a myth, and vegetable proteins can stand alone [Ref: Journal of the American Dietetic Association, vol. 96, no. 3 (March 1996), pp. 230-231].
Below we give vegetarian sources of other essential nutrients that people often wrongly think that they will get from non-vegetarian sources only.
- Iron – lentils (daal), pistacio, cashews, raisin, dates, almonds, sunflower, banana, tomato.
- Zinc – beans, cereals, soy, nuts, peas, and seeds.
- Vitamin B12 – milk, curd, cheese, yeast, cereals.
- Omega-3 – mustard, rapeseed (canola) oil, olive oil, walnuts, avocado, soy, grains.
- Omega-6 – vegetables, fruits, nuts, grains and seeds.
Journal of American Dietic Association writes in its Position Statement [Ref: vol. 109, issue 7, pages 1266-1282 (July 2009)]: “appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the lifecycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.”
Question 2: Aren’t humans omnivore?
Answer: Consider the following chart from the article entitled “The Comparative Anatomy of Eating” (2009) by Dr. Milton R. Mills, M.D.
He shows that in terms of anatomical features such as facial muscle, jaw motion, canine teeth, chewing, saliva enzymes, stomach acidity (pH factor), length ratio of small intestine and body, liver function, kidney function etc., human beings are more similar to herbivores than to carnivores or omnivores.
“Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores”, says Dr. William Clifford Roberts, M.D., M.A.C.C., who is
- Current editor of American Journal of Cardiology and the Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings
- Ex-editor of American Heart Journal, American Journal of Geriatric Cardiology, American Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Medicine and Sports, Cardiac Chronicle, Clinical Perspectives in Cardiology, Journal of Heart Disease, etc.
- Ex-head of the pathology section at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)
- Regular reviewer of the annual scientific sessions of the American Heart Association (AHA)
- One of the active leaders of the American College of Cardiology (ACC).
Question 3: Haven’t humans always been eating meat?
Answer: Rob Dunn, biologist in the Department of Biology at North Carolina State University, argues in his Scientific American article, dated July 23, 2012 that “Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians.”
There are many evidences that early humans had diets similar to the great apes. Meat- eating probably began by scavenging, i.e., eating the leftovers that carnivores had left behind. Research by National Science Foundation (NSF) on nutcracker man also strengthens the odds of early humans being vegetarian.
Examination of gladiator bones by Medical University of Vienna in Austria and University of Bern in Switzerland has established that gladiators were mostly vegetarian.
Question 4: Isn’t non-vegetarian food healthier than vegetarian food?
Answer: According to Mayo Clinic, that ranked No. 1 on the 2015-2016 U.S. News & World Report List of “Best Hospitals”, and has been near the top for more than 20 years: “people who eat only plant-based foods — aka vegetarians — generally eat fewer calories and less fat, weigh less, and have a lower risk of heart disease than non-vegetarians do. Just eating less meat has a protective effect.
Dr. Bimal Chhajer, M.D. (Cardiology), ex-faculty of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, the pioneer of non-invasive cardiac treatment in India, write in his book The Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism: “a Physician and cardiologist treating heart disease cannot recommend non- vegetarian food to heart patients and even to those who want to prevent heart disease.”
A study of 44,500 people by University of Oxford published in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, March 2013, vol. 97, no. 3, pp. 597-603 establishes that vegetarians cut heart risk by 32%” (Covered in BBC News, 30 January 2013).
Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of the Department of Nutritional Biochemistry, Cornell University, claims that animal protein turns on cancer. Indeed, Heterocyclic Amines (HCA), a family of mutagenic compounds, e.g., amino-imidazo-quinolines, or amino-imidazo-quinoxalines (collectively called IQ-type compounds), and amino-imidazo-pyridines such as PhIP are produced during the cooking process of many animal products, including chicken, beef, pork, and fish [Ref: Food and Chem. Toxicol. vol. 36, pp. 879-896, 1998].
Dr. Neal Barnard, M.D., has shown that even every sample of grass-fed, organic, free-range chicken and fish induces cancerous chemicals into your body, such as Trimethylamine N-oxide and PhIP or 2-Amino-1-methyl-6-phenylimidazo(4,5-b)pyridine.
According to Dr. John McDougall, M.D., fish protein can cause osteoporosis and mercury contamination in fish is not good for heart, kidney and nervous system.
Research at University of Louisville, Kentucky, USA, presented at the Experimental Biology Meeting 2015, demonstrates that eating egg, fish, meat may promote memory loss.
Depression, anxiety, and fear of death in animals release stress hormones like Adrenaline and Cortisol which in turn have a negative impact on the consumer’s mental ability.
Question 5: Isn’t non-vegetarian food tastier than vegetarian food?
Answer: Taste is a conditioning. Hypoxanthine and other similar substances, such as inosinic acid and guanylic acid, are present in meat. They have a chemical structure similar to that of caffeine in coffee with similar effects. They are central nervous system stimulants and addictive. Because of this addiction, one feels that non-vegetarian food is tasty.
Another evidence of the addiction is that non-vegetarians experience extreme withdrawal syndrome, if they try to quit. If the quitters accidentally eat some day, they think its fine to eat occasionally and then without their knowledge they increase the frequency of consumption beyond control.
Question 6: Even if non-vegetarian food is unhealthy, still, its consumption is my personal choice. How does it matter to you?
Answer: Amazon rainforest destruction due to cattle ranching and shift of global climate is a known fact now. A paper by World Bank’s Lead Environmental advisors Goodland & Anhang claims that more than 51% of world’s carbon footprint is due to the meat industry. As a result, melting of ice in arctics, rise of sea-levels and extinction of several species are conspicuous.
It takes more than 2400 Gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, whereas it takes only 25 Gallons of water to produce 1 pound of wheat. India is a giant victim by animal farming based water pollution. Ganga pollution-monitoring project run by Patna University found that fish taken from the Ganga River contained DDT in the fish’s flesh 16,000 times more concentrated than it was in the water itself.
Eating meat contributes to land pollution as well. According to Oregon State University agriculture professor Peter Cheeke, animals raised for food in the U.S. produce roughly 89,000 pounds excrement per second, all without the benefit of waste-treatment systems.
United Nations have also felt that to save the environment, the whole world should shift to plant-based diet.
One acre of land can produce 40000 pound of tomatoes, 53000 pounds of potatoes and only 130 pounds of beef. More than 60% of the crops grown in amazon rain-forest are fed to artificially bred animals. In 2013, scientists from the Institute on the Environment and the University of Minnesota reached the conclusion that if all food crops were fed directly to humans instead of animals, then the world hunger would vanish.
Your personal choice no longer remains personal, as soon as it interferes with the global environment that we live in.
Question 7: Plants have life. So if killing an animal is unethical and immoral, isn’t killing a plant equally so?
Answer: There are several major differences between killing animals and plants.
- Killing is mandatory for eating an animal. But in most cases killing is not mandatory for eating plant-products — we take merely the leaves or the fruits.
- Animals are killed prematurely for better taste. On the other hand, for the few cases where the whole plant needs to be uprooted, the process is done during the harvesting season at the end of the life-cycle of the plants.
- Animals have central nervous system to feel pain. There are pathways carrying electric impulse from nociceptors / pain receptors to the brain. Interestingly, plants have no central nervous system to process pain. Plants merely emit local response to the stimuli.
- Animals have evolutionary benefits in processing pain. Since plants are natural food for human beings, they have no evolutionary benefit to run away.
- We are designed to be visually moved by ghastly bloodshed of animal killing. But in plant killing, no such thing happens.
- For animals, we have only binary choice – either kill or not. For plants, there are many layers of options.
Question 8: I am a Bengali. Eating fish is part of our tradition. Many great luminaries of Bengal, like Swami Vivekananda, were non-vegetarian. So why should I deviate from my own cultural heritage?
Answer: Grossly heinous acts like Sati Daaha (burning widows alive) also were once considered to be inevitable part of our glorious Bengali tradition. Raja Ram Mohan Roy taught us that traditions can lead to immoral criminal activities as well!
The traditional food of Bengalis have been milk, rice and shaak (green leafy vegetables). Fish eating was sporadic among some people living by the sea-side or river-side. Rampant use of fish in everyday dish began with commercial fish farming in tanks, that flourished during the industrialization in British period. Moreover, chicken and goat consumption by Bengalis grew during the British and Islam period and none of these have been part of our real age-old traditions.
Many great luminaries of Bengal were not only vegetarians, they strongly preached for vegetarianism. They are Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Rishi Aurobindo, Ram Thakur, Sitaramdas Omkarnath, Anukul Thakur, Bijoy Krishna Goswami, Shyamacharan Lahiri, Paramhamsa Yogananda, Maa Anandamayi, Pranavananda Maharaj, just to name a few.
Many great luminaries of Bengal were non-vegetarians as well , but that does not justify the righteousness of the activities. One should learn from their special talents and appreciate their achievements, but not at the cost of imitating their bad habits. For example, instead of drinking like Michael Madhusudan Dutt, we should respect his literary skills. Instead of smoking like Satyajit Ray, we should focus on his caliber in literature and films. We can look up to Mahanayak Uttam Kumar on the subtle lessons on Acting or Performing Arts. In personal life, he was known to be very kind-hearted and helpful, often giving non-refundable financial help to laymen. However, we shouldn’t learn from him how to cause fast damage to our lever and ruin our health!
As Swami Vivekananda matured in spirituality, he also appreciated the principle of vegetarianism. In a lecture at the vegetarian dinner of the V Club of New York, held at the St. Denis Hotel, Broadway and Eleventh Street, Swami Vivekananda mentioned: “In this country, when animals are injured, it is the custom to kill them. In India it is the rule to send them to a hospital. In approaching Bombay, the first thing the traveler comes across is a very large hospital for animals. This has been the practice for 4,000 years.” (New York Times, May 2, 1894).
Elsewhere, Swamiji also says: “I myself may not be a very strict vegetarian, but I understand the ideal. When I eat meat I know it is wrong. Even if I am bound to eat it under certain circumstances, I know it is cruel. I must not drag my ideal down to the actual and apologise for my weak conduct in this way. The ideal is not to eat flesh, not to injure any being, for all animals are my brothers” (Complete works, 2.40), and further: “All liking for fish and meat disappears when pure Sattva is highly developed” (Complete works, 5.403).
Bengalis grow in Rabindranath, live in Rabindranath and die in Rabindranath. Let us conclude by highlighting his views on animal slaughter. Inspired by his nephew Balendranath Thakur who was an animal rights activist, Rabindranath wrote in his Letter to Indira Devi (1894): “We manage to swallow flesh only because we do not think of the cruel and sinful thing that we do. Cruelty… is a fundamental sin, and admits of no arguments or nice distinctions.“