Why vegan?

Because solidarity, first of all. Behind  a pair of  moving eyes there is a creature who lives, thinks, suffers or is happy, exactly as me  Has no importance if it is big or small, but in the same way as me, tries to live as better as possible using what the Nature has given to it.
Why should kill it (or let other people the task to doing for me) for  eating  when there are better ways to do this?
On the contrary what common people is induced to believe, there are no costs or renounces to be vegetarian.  More, as the time passes by, our body adapts itself, day after day, and  we unveil thousand  new flavours that are ignored by a diet as that based heavily on meat.
For untrusting and doubtful people that believe that the animals react mechanically and  just only for instinct, I have put at the end of this page an episode, by direct experience, to demonstrate that the animals understand

Advantages:  more than feel yourself  tuned to the nature, you have a lot of  advantages as economical as relating your health.
Less cost for foods:  with the same quantity of recovered components, the meat requires more than six times of resources: water, feedstuff ( from vegetables or worse  from animals ), care and work, pre-selling treatements and conservation. Total costs are much more higher. As a short example do check  a dish of pasta and beans (tipical dish of the mediterranian diet) vs a steak. Not only the cost is lower for the  former but you will get a bigger quantity of components back (proteins etc.) and less problems for your health. (see   bogus infos  next on this page)

More choice of flavours. It can't exist a diet with only animal foods, but one with just only vegetables yes, it can. Animals used as food are in western countries (in the oriental ones they eat animals that we could not bear) not more than a few hundred  different kinds. The different flavours  among these ones are very minimal, in  many cases derived from treatements for conservation, more than from the meat itself. The vegetable kinds that you can use in the kitchen are many thousands with tastes  spannig from piquant one of the chily pepper to the sweet of banana to acid of lemon, to the fresh of minth to the greasy of the olive oil, the lightweight of bread (in particular some types like baguette) to heavy of peanuts to the scent  of  some Apiales ( anise, fennel, cuminum), all these cited  only to give a very few examples.

Less ecological impact. The  intensive animal breeding arises problems of many types that the agricolture alone don't: necessity of wide areas as grazing land, most of them from cutting timbers and forests,  escrements and sewages to waste in so a great quantity that they saturates the possibilities of self-depuration of the earth, wich often  pollute the underground dinkable waters for humans,   eutrophication of waters, virus illness (no virus of the vegetables is able to attack the men) and so on.
As the way of the substances is through many stages, there are unavoidable more wastes relating the same final weight. It has been calculated that if all the man were vegetarian not only the actual world wouldn't know famine but the earth could support more than 20 billions of humans. 

Phisical health. A vegetarian diet, with the same calories, is  more digestible and contains, in a natural way, elements that often  you have to assume apart if you have a diet heavily based on meat. These are normally called food integrators  underlining that a meat based diet is poor.  

Protection from illness. These are properties that physicians and dietologists are discovering, also the ones not interested in particular in vegetarian diet, day by day more and more: low level of cholesterol in the blood, protection from cancer and diabetes. Minimal frequence of illness caused by uric acid. Less hazard from  rotten foods (in the meat and foods from animals grows very easily the  Clostridium botulinum   a bacterium responsible for the death from  intoxication from foods. When it dies it release  the strongest poison on the earth. ' 450 grams would be more than  sufficient to extermine all the human beeing on the planet', from Wikipedia. Sorrily it isn't easily  recognizable when you  eat rotten meat. On vegetable foods there are more frequent moulds that are less poisonous and easily seen)
On the site of Arcoiris.tv you can download the short movie 'Magiare carne fa male' (To eat meat make ill). The page is in italian but you can download also the english edition of the movie.
More, the ANSA  (the most important italian news association) has published a short article about some advices  the Italian Research association for Cancer (AIRC) is sharing in a booklet  to have a better protection against cancer. It doesn't recomend to go veg, but anyway it is a recognizing of what vegetarians are saying since a long time:  'ARANCE, ALGHE, SPEZIE: LA SPESA ANTI-CANCRO'


Disadvantages:

Difficulties in the normal restaurants.  By fortune since about twenty years a lot of things have been changed. Todays in the normal snack-bar  (at least in Italy) you can find  vegetarian sandwiches or something like. In restaurants there is a little more difficulty, but in any case you will not suffer the famine.

Necessity to inform curious people. There is always someone that ask you why you are vegetarian, but this is not really a disadvantge after all, and sometimes it happens that someone is really interested and he too will become vegetarian, it  happened to me more than once. In any case it is useful to change the behaviour of the people toward the vegetarianism.

Bogus infos to be corrected  There are some false information that are shared from time to time  here and there, by voice but somtimes on paper.
Till about  twenty years ago, the most common critics toward vegetarian diet were that it didn't have sufficient quantity of protein.  In front of the evidence these critics have almost disappeared.  In effect  the pair cereals-legumes can deliver all the  about twenty aminoacids necessary to bild all the protein that our body needs.
It has been calculated that if  we would make  a catalog  containing just one single molecule of all the possible proteins, it wouldn't be sufficient the whole room of the univers to contain it.  In effect any individual has unique personal type of protein, not available in any other individuals of the same kind  or other kinds of animals . (this is the phenomenon of immunitarian system of the organisms: any protein that is not used in that individual has to be destroyed)

By consequence, when proteins are from eating other animals, our body must break these complex aminoacid chains, that are proteins, into the original simple amionoacids before it can use them.   This will generate an unwanted product  that is the  uric acid. This must be wasted otherwise it will accumulate and produce illness as gout,  illness for nobles because upon a time only noble and rich class was able to eat meat (in particular from chased animals) everyday, while for common people to eat meat was a luxury restricted to special holidays only.  In the vegetables protein are very simple so more esasily broken and the uric acid produced is very low.
At last, nowadays , people with a minimal culture admit that a dish of pasta and beans is more nutrient than a dish of meat-

Vitamins. A vegetarian diet offers all the vitamins less two: A and D. This is true, but it has no importance because our body is able to reconstruct them: the A vitamin from the beta-carotene (known also as protovitamin A, for this reason), wich is the substance causing the red and orange coloration in the vegetables (for instance the carrot  from which it takes the name). The D vitamin is directly generated by the body when it is exposed to the sun. For this reason who is affected from rachitis has to be exposed to the sunlight, as this vitamin D has the function of fixing the calcium in the bones.

Animals can understand

A day  I passed near a barrel  that people use to collect the rain in the country, I saw a  lizard that was swimming and desperately trying to get out, beyond the vertical  walls  of the barrel. I went nearer and I tried to take it on hand, but it escaped here and there to not be captured.
So I took a branch and I put it on the border and into the water, like staircase so that the lizard could grasp ad get out by itself. It tried to do more than once but it couldn't, probable because its arts were unable to grasp well on this type of surface.
After some failed trials I thought that the best way at this point was to catch it anyway, though its tentatives to escape.
With a big surprise it didn't move and it let itself be catched without any difficulty. Then I put my hand on the ground and I had to force it gently  to go away.
Thinking about this fact I got  aware that the lizard has understood at once that I put the branch   for it to get out of the  barrel, because it immediately tried to do, and also it has understood that my willness was to help it and I was not a danger for it. So it let to be taken by me because it was aware that it was the only way to be safe.
A lizard has a very little brain, perhaps of a few grams, but it works well.

Another wonderful story about animals, taken from the press some time ago:
In Australia a group of peopke was swimming, when in a once it was surrounded by a group of dolphins. When one of the swimmer tried to get out of the circle the dolphins, gently  but firmly pushed him back.  Only then they were conscious  that a shark was swimming around them and after about half an hour it got away seeing that was impossible to reach the people defended by the dolphins. After that also the dolphins got away

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