I am frequently asked why it is that keep harping on about living a vegan life.  To express the following in a short sentence seems to be impossible.  To simply respond "Because I want to live a long time" generally gets the retort, "Well don't we all?".  To go deeper into the subject often arouses either anger or boredom.

The following is taken from this web site, but I often update it, so felt it worthwhile putting it up as a blog.

I would welcome any reasons for becoming a vegan or for not becoming a vegan, that are not shown below.  And I would welcome any challenge to the reasons given.



Reasons for becoming Vegan 

• You live a long time.
  
• You join the majority; more than 75% of the world’s population are vegans. 
  
• You avoid or reverse chronic diseases, (as scientifically proven) such as cancer, cardio-vascular degeneration, weakened bones, diabetes, dementia, many food allergies and other life restricting ailments. 
  
• You are more than 40% less likely to get cancer.
  
• You will live, on average, more than 10 years longer than your meat eating friends.
  
• You  become more active and alert.
  
• You never feel bloated after a meal.
  
• You never feel hungry.
  
• You change your weight, you eliminate your obesity.
  
• You save a huge number of dollars.
  
• You reduce your dependence on pharmaceutical products.
  
• You discover exciting new flavours and tastes.
  
• You reduce your environmental footprint more than any other single activity. 
  
• Despite living longer, you save your country, your insurer or your family from some of the major expenses of old age.
  
• Your ancestors developed, to your present high performance level, through eating starches, not, as many erroneous advocates would have us believe, from eating meat.
  
• You eliminate fatty/oily deposits on plates and kitchen surroundings - minimizing detergent usage.
  
• You will not get food poisoning.
  
• You avoid bacterial contamination of cutting boards.
  
• There is every likelihood that you will die of old age
  
• You will never die from veganism.
  

     
Reasons for not becoming a vegan 

• You don’t believe the science proving the association between animal proteins and heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
  
• You have weighed up the risks versus rewards and believe that the pleasures of meat eating is worth the risks, even if you die at least ten years earlier of an agonising condition.
  
• You don’t want to consider the huge impact on the environment created by the production and consumption of meat and milk. 
  
• You have not considered what the world would look like if everyone ate meat.
  
• You don’t want to change the status quo.
  
• You like eating animal fats and proteins. 
  
• You worry what the farmers will do, if their income from meat and milk is reduced.
  

An article in the Dominion Post about Bruce Wills, Federated Farmers president on July 7, raised my ire and elicited the  following letter to the editor.  I subsequently discovered that it was too long, so precised it for the editor.  I doubt that either version will be published, but felt my views should be aired somewhere, so here they are. 

He states that forestry, farming and fishing account for more than 69% of export receipts for New Zealand and compares this with the 72% of mining and oil receipts of Australia, suggesting that New Zealand’s exports are more sustainable.

I would suggest that his comparison is foolish.  

Forestry may appear to have some sort of sustainability, providing we don’t worry about the lack of biodiversity, nor the paltry receipts we earn from the huge amount of unprocessed wood going out as logs.

Modern farming methods are without question unsustainable.  The following facts have to be acknowledged.  Phosphate fertilisers continuing to be mined elsewhere and brought in to the country, indicate an unsustainable practice. Nitrate fertilisers continue to inexorably pollute our otherwise pristine table waters, (even once all streams are fenced off), leading to an unsustainable situation.  Relative to the volume of milk produced, water usage is extraordinarily high and unsustainable, (selling bottled water would use less and possibly be a higher net earner).  Methane emissions from ruminants, a huge contributor to global warming, is an unsustainable practice and it will be a very long time, if ever, that this condition will change. The trucking of vast amounts of water laden bovine excretions (milk) around the country, only to have most of this evaporated away before the sale of a dry commodity is surely unsustainable.

Fishing also suffers from an obvious lack of sustainability, in that there are now substantiated predictions that, even if the oceans don’t warm up to the levels being scientifically predicted, the world’s fish stocks will be depleted within 40 years.  There is little New Zealand can do about this on the world scene.

We must stop fooling ourselves.  Not only are we still selling commodities, many of them unprocessed, to a faraway world market, we are selling against producers who are closer to market, on lower cost structures and often unrestricted by laws of behaviour.  The growth of livestock numbers in developing countries is one of the worrying aspects of our future value as an exporter of animal protein.

To cap all this is the proven and growing recognition that animal proteins and fats are the basic cause of all our major ailments, such as heart disease, cancer, vascular disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, obesity, arthritis and so many more debilitating and hideously costly diseases, the management of which are economically unsustainable.

I suggest that our situation is no more secure than Australia, when they have “dug up all the ground”.  I don’t know what our alternatives are but I sure do know that we should wake up to what our problems are.

It is a bit late in my life, but I know there is still plenty of time to get my body back into the shape and health it deserves.  I also know that it is imperative for me to persuade my family and friends to adopt the same way of life as I have.

The more people who adopt a plant based whole food way of life, the healthier we all will be, we will live longer and hugely reduce our carbon foot print.