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A person is typically vegetarian for health, environmental, religious, and moral reasons.
HEALTH
Eating excessive meat can increase risk of chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Meat is rich in cholesterol and takes a long time to digest. Also, food poisoning cases are frequently acquired from animal products consumption. In contrast, vegetarians have lower cancer rates and thus have great possibility to live longer than their counterparts. Although there is also fiber in meat and dairy products, vegetarians can get more fiber in vegetables. In fact, the low fat vegetarian or so-called Ornish diet is proven to combat heart disease. Additionally, a lot of vegetarians weigh less than meat-eating people.
ENVIRONMENT
Vegetarians help preserve the environment through protecting animals. Meat-eating diets contribute indirectly to deforestation. Massive amounts of methane are produced from livestock farming that negatively adds to greenhouse gases and contributes to global warming. In fact, greenhouse gases from livestock are higher than the amount released by cars around the world. Also, more water resources go to large-scale meat production that could be used for other purposes. So it is more wasteful raising animals than raising vegetation for human consumption. They are indeed confident that adopting a meatless lifestyle is one of the effective ways of protecting the environment.
RELIGION
For Buddhism, Hinduism, and Seventh Day Adventists, to stay away from meat is the ideal way to promote nonviolence and advance in spiritual aspect. For these people, eating any animal-based products creates bad karma.
ETHICS
Caring for animals is another reason why some people choose to be vegetarians. They do not want to eat meat as this is morally wrong for them. Vegetarians believe that to raise animals for slaughter and kill them for food is a means of denying their natural rights. Also, vegetarians are not in favor of slaughterhouses, where animals are slaves. Additionally, vegans object to wearing anything made from animals.
On the other hand, vegetables are a very great source of dietary fiber so medical experts in white scrubs would probably say that being vegetarian is a healthy lifestyle.
