Trying to Stay Healthy - Essay Example

"Trying to Stay Healthy" is a perfect example of a paper on food and nutrition. With the growing trend to be physically fit, many people turn to all kinds of methods to try to stay as healthy as possible. People often resort to all kinds of crazy diets, fads, or dietary supplements to try to stay healthy, lose weight, or keep body shape. Sometimes people can resort to vegetarianism to try to fit this style. Other people simply do not like the other eating choices, be they moral obligations or physical tasting ones. These people also became vegetarians simply because that is what they like to eat. However, both of these groups of people who chose this eating style are forgoing some of the body’s most important nutrients and are not always staying quite as healthy as they think they are.

One of the most surprising facts about people who eat only green foods is that they are more likely to get diagnosed with cancer. “The risk of contracting breast cancer is 3.8 times greater for women who eat plants daily and the risk of fatal prostate cancer is 3.6 times greater for men who consume plants, shrubbery, bushes, and soy milk daily”, and while these numbers may be surprising, it is not hard to understand once you think about it. Most plants are often sprayed with pesticides, which can lead to cancer developing in humans. So next time you think about going on al all the green diet, think again.

Many vegetarians often use cruelty to animals' arguments when they are questioned about their eating methods. They claim that it is much more humane to eat plans and that by eating meat other people are supporting the business that is cruel to animals and treat them improperly.

Well, that may be true. But research has proven “that plants have some level of awareness of their environments. How can one argue about animal rights without knowing how much does a single plant can feel (or how much is a plant aware of what it feels) at all?”. There goes their entire animal rights argument, when eating plants may be just as harmful to the plants as their cruelty to animal arguments that they often use.

The other side to their animal cruelty argument is that most vegetarians will allow themselves to use other animal or animal-tested products. If they use glue, makeup, other cosmetics, leather, gelatin, some medicines, or a myriad of other products they are supporting the same treatment for animals that they claim to be against. This totally blows away their argument, and really puts them on a level of hypocrisy.

And last but certainly not least, vegetarians are not getting all of the nutrients our bodies need just by eating plants. Our bodies were made to run off of a group of certain nutrients, and many of these nutrients are only gotten by eating meat. If you go on an only green diet you could, in fact, be making your self even more unhealthy and making your physical condition worse off than it was before. This alone is a reason for all people to eat all foods to try to best incorporate all of the important nutrients our body needs to work and produce body functions to the best of its ability. Eating only green food is not healthy, and can leave your body in extreme depletion levels of some very important nutrients and vitamins that are needed for life.

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