I became a vegetarian at the age of seventeen, and turned vegan in my mid-thirties. When I went vegetarian, I had two reasons. First, there was the matter of health, since there was so much heart disease in my family. With so many relatives dying of heart disease in their fifties, I didn’t want to feel middle-aged at twenty-five. Second, there was an emotional component: it seemed cruel to me to slaughter animals, especially since it was clearly unnecessary, as there were plenty of vegetarians around the world, and, according to everything I had heard, they tended to be healthier than meat-eaters. They certainly weren’t
dropping dead from a lack of meat in their diet. I felt that by going vegetarian, I was doing a service to myself and to the animals.
I was wrong on both counts.
Since I continued to eat cheese (the only animal product I ate), I was ingesting animal protein, saturated fat, and cholesterol—the same substances I had ingested when, in earlier years, I ate McDonald’s hamburgers. Many vegetarians eat not only cheese but eggs as well, and if they eat those foods in significant quantity, it’s hard to see how, from a health perspective, their diet differs meaningfully from the diet of meat-eaters. If you trade in chicken and steak for eggs and cheese, you haven’t changed your diet in a meaningful way.
You’re still taking in the same kinds of proteins and fats as before, you’re still missing out on fiber and phytonutrients, and you’re still polluting your cells with toxins and endotoxins.
But at least nobody had to slaughter a cow for me to eat cheese, right?
That was not true, either. I didn’t think deeply enough to ask myself what would happen to the cow, which had been tied to a stanchion for three or four years, after she was “spent”—in other words, no longer producing enough milk. She is of course slaughtered at that time. She doesn’t get clemency for years of helping to provide cheese for vegetarians. The slaughter of spent dairy cows for beef is what helps keep the price of burgers cheap. There would be no beef industry without the dairy industry, and there would be no dairy industry without the beef industry.
In my mid-thirties, while still a vegetarian, I started to get develop pains around my heart. For a moment, I felt sorry for myself. My genes were so terrible that even as a vegetarian I was still developing heart disease!
I didn’t go to a doctor, though. Instead, I simply thought about it. I had shunned meat for almost two decades because of the saturated fat and cholesterol. Yet I had been eating cheese, which is full of saturated fat and cholesterol. I realized that I had been foolish. I gave up the cheese, and never had a pain around my heart again.
If you want to be good to your heart, you need to embark on a vegan diet of whole plant foods, not a vegetarian diet.
The same is true if you want to be good to the cows.
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