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At the present time approximately 5% of the population of the United States, or around 12 million people, consider themselves to be vegetarian. But a high percentage of these people occasionally eat meat. According to a Roper Poll done by the Vegetarian Resource Group in 1994 and 1997, only 1% of the population in the US is a Pure Vegetarian. This definition of pure vegetarian is to never consciously eat meat, fish or poultry, but eggs and dairy can be eaten.

The definition of Pure Vegetarian in this book is a person who does not consciously eat meat, fish, poultry or eggs; dairy can be eaten, which is the Hindu definition. A pure vegetarian will never eat meat under any circumstances. They will also avoid products that have meat products in them such as cheese made with the rennet of a cow's stomach, yogurt or pudding that contains gelatin, refried beans with lard in them, candy that contains eggs and other ingredients derived from meat products, and marshmallows and baked goods that contain eggs.

Many people consider eating eggs to be vegetarian but according to our definition eating eggs is not pure vegetarian because it means eating what would eventually become a chicken. There are often animal products hidden in food and non-food items such as in medicines, cosmetics, toothpastes, soaps, etc.

These products should also be avoided for a person to be considered a pure vegetarian.

Reasons to be a Vegetarian
1. Because of the extreme mistreatment that animals have to go through while being raised for slaughter.
2. Health reasons.
3. Moral reasons. People don't want to kill animals in order to eat, when they can survive by eating vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts and milk.
4. Religious reasons. Certain religions prohibit the eating of meat. Seventh Day Adventists do not eat meat and Hindus often do not eat meat.
5. Some people just don't like the taste of meat.
6. Some people don't like the idea that meat sometimes contains diseases, such as Salmonella, Mad Cow (Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease - CJD) or Listeria. Salmonella and Listeria are bacterias that can be found in meats and meat products. In heavy doses they can cause severe illness and maybe even death. A minor case of either disease may be over within 24 hours and appears like a flu. Mad Cow Disease can cause damage to the brain and cause death. It can cause a person to go crazy.

Diseases Found In Meat
Crammed together in unclean conditions, force-fed, and inhumanely treated, animals set to be slaughtered contract more diseases than is normal. Meat inspectors attempt to filter out bad meat, but because there is not sufficient time for examination and pressures from the industry, sometimes bad meat gets through to the consumer.

A report by the USDA in 1972 lists carcasses that passed inspection after the diseased parts were removed. Examples included nearly 100,000 cows with eye cancer and 3,596,302 cases of abscessed liver.

Meat and poultry are the primary sources of food borne pathogens, which cause over 10 million cases of human illnesses and 9,000 deaths a year in the US. Microbial pathogens are microorganisms that cause diseases from bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. Campylobacter and salmonella are not regulated and account for 80% of illnesses and 75% of diseases derived from meat or poultry. One infected animal can contaminate 16 tons of beef.

Raw meat often contains dangerous bacteria, which is often not regulated by either the USDA or FDA. It is expected that the consumers themselves kill dangerous pathogen bacteria. It is often found that meat is still raw and is not totally cooked when eaten; therefore it still contains dangerous bacteria.

The government allows the sale of chickens with airsacculitis, a pneumonia-like disease that causes pus-laden mucus to collect in the lungs. In order to meet federal standards, the chicken's chest cavities are cleaned out with air-suction guns. But during this process, diseased air sacs sometimes burst and pus seeps into the meat.

Many chickens are infected with campylobacter, a bacterial infection that causes bloody diarrhea, cramps and fever, and can lead to death (up to 800 a year in the US). Twenty percent of chickens with this disease were found to be resistant to quinolones (an antibiotic). This resistance was caused by FDA approval of use of this antibiotic for therapeutic use in chickens.

Chickens contaminated with salmonella, campylobacter and other diseased organisms are sold to people. The amount of salmonella and campylobacter is not tested. The US Code of Federal Regulations allows for birds with tumors and other disease manifestation to be sold after cutting out the infected sites.

Many of the seafood companies break the food safety regulations. Inspectors from the FDA only visit seafood-processing plants once a year, and often this only entails visiting their office and asking them what they are doing to insure food safety. Half the fish consumed in the US are imported and their processing plants are rarely inspected by US inspectors.

E coli O157:H7, which causes humans to get sick according to the USDA, may infect half the cattle that are used for ground beef. Each year over 73,000 people become sick from it and 600 die from it in the US. Mild symptoms cause diarrhea and abdominal cramps, and red-blood-cell destruction.

Worst cases may cause kidney failure, paralysis and blindness, and a partial removal of the bowel.
Around 20% of US herds of cows are believed to be infected with Johne's disease. This disease has been linked to Crohn's disease, which causes a chronic case of diarrhea, and may cause the victim to have part of their intestines removed.

Hoof-and-mouth disease is a disease that causes infected animals to get blisters on their hooves and lips, and causes the animals to have problems with eating because of the blisters, loss of appetite and fever. Rarely is this disease fatal to the animals.

Recently over two million animals were destroyed in the UK because of it, though only 1,400 actually had the disease. The rest were killed to supposedly keep the disease from spreading. Even though the government eventually decided that the best way to eradicate the disease was by using antibiotics (which easily kills the disease), many of the farmers requested that their animals be destroyed because they received payment from the government for these destroyed animals. Some farmers figured that if their infected animals were treated instead of killed, then the value of their herds would be highly reduced, because people would not want to purchase meat from cattle located anywhere near where there were infected cattle.

Often cooked meat contains benzenes and carcinogenic compounds.

Often meat eating can cause long-term digestive problems. Animal products can often putrefy the colon. If food is not properly digested, it can remain in the intestine and cause general health problems; and this often happens with meat.

In 1996, nine people in the United Kingdom died of a degenerative brain disease linked to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, popularly known as mad cow disease. Medical experts suspected that the victims contracted the disease by eating contaminated beef.

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Terrible Treatment of Animals that are Slaughtered
Over 100,000 cattle are killed each day in the US. They are killed by being hung by their feet and having their throats cut, killed with a stun-gun, or shocked by electric prods. While being slaughtered, they are often beaten and kicked.

Factory hens are forced to live through totally outrageous living conditions. Chickens are kept crammed with four to eight chickens in a small cage. Each hen is kept confined in about 48 to 86 square inches of space. When egg production of chickens are reduced to almost nothing, they can be induced to resume egg production by forced molt, which is done by water deprivation and starvation for up to two weeks. Most hens are molted at least once in their lives. This practice is so bad that even McDonald's won't purchase eggs from suppliers that engage in this procedure.

There is no sell-by date for chickens, so it is unknown how long a dead chicken has been sitting around in a processing plant, trucks, storage, on the road, or a meat case before being sold.

In the production of veal, male calves are put in cramped cages and chained by their necks to keep them from turning around. They are fed a diet without roughage and iron to cause the meat of an almost fully-grown animal to be whitest and tender, like a newborn calf. They are injected with hormones and antibiotics to make them grow and to stay alive.

Drugs in Animals
Over 20,000 different drugs are used on animals, such as antibiotics, sterols and growth hormones. These drugs in animals are consumed when meat products are eaten. This could lead to a problem with secondary consumption of antibiotics.

How Meat Eating Destroys the Environment
At the present time, 70% of the grains in the US and 40% of the grains in the world are fed to livestock. It takes up to 16 pounds of soybeans and grains to produce one pound of beef and three to six pounds to produce one pound of turkey or eggs. The World Health Organization says that 1.2 billion people in the world do not get enough to eat. If less grains were fed to livestock, this would highly reduce that number.

A disproportionate amount of the resources of the earth are used to produce meat products. About half the water used by the US is used for cattle production. It takes 3 to 15 times as much water to produce animal protein as it does plant protein. A cow needs to eat 7 pounds of protein derived from soybeans or grains to make a pound of beef.

Around 390 gallons of water are used to produce a pound of beef and just 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat.

Many trees are being cut down throughout the world so more cattle can be grazed. Much of this deforestation takes place in the tropical rain forests in Central and South America. Cattle production is the main reason for the destruction of the rain forests in Central and South America. More than 25% of the forests in Central America have been destroyed because of cattle production. For every quarter pound of hamburger exported from the region, there is a loss of 55 square feet of rain forest.

When livestock grazes on land this tends to cause erosion of the topsoil and the land to dry out. The US has lost about one-third of its topsoil. Good topsoil helps to keep land more cultivable.

Cattle production causes soil depletion. Around 685 million acres, 85 percent of the US western rangeland, is being degraded because of overgrazing.
Tens of millions of tons of methane are released into the atmosphere by the 1.3 billion cattle. Hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 go into the atmosphere by burning forests to make pastures for cattle, which causes global warning.

It takes 78 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of beef protein; 35 calories for 1 calorie of pork; 22 calories for 1 of poultry; but just 1 calorie of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of soybeans.

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Livestock Organic Waste Helps Destroy the Environment
Cattle production produces a billion tons of organic waste each year. The waste from animals, fertilizers and pesticides is the main source of water pollution in the US. According to the EPA, field agricultural runoff is the main source of 60% of river and stream pollution.

A 1997 Senate report documents that livestock produces 10,000 pounds of solid manure for every person in the US. The waste from livestock is 130 times that produced by humans. When it rains, phosphorous and nitrogen from the manure seep into rivers and streams, which causes algae blooms (red tides). It also causes the increase of dinoflagellates, which are a one-celled entity that has killed millions of fish. If a human comes in contact with them, they experience sores on their skin and may experience memory loss.

Free-Range Chickens
Defining a chicken as "free-range," as sold in natural food store, insinuates that free range chickens are better treated and therefore morally alright to eat them. The government's definition of "free-range" just means that the poultry from which this meat is derived have had access to the outdoors. This could mean just a small area outside for thousands of birds.

This does not mean that all the other tortuous techniques being inflicted on factory-farmed birds are not inflicted on free range chickens also.
According to Consumer Report (March 1998), it found that free-range poultry was more contaminated by salmonella and campylobacter than non free-range poultry. 63% of the tested chickens had salmonella, 16% had campylobacter and 8% had both.

Dangers of Meat & Fishing Industry
The meat industry is often found guilty of health, environmental and labor violations. Each year over 20,000 men are killed worldwide in the fishing industry according to the Agriculture Organization of the UN. This makes it the most dangerous profession. A fisherman in the US is sixteen times more likely to be killed on the job than a policeman or fireman.

Potentially Dangerous Chemicals and Natural Products
Many of the over 25,000 chemicals used in cosmetic and personal care products have not been tested properly for danger to humans. Many of these products are toxins or contain toxic products.

Some things that can be dangerous in cosmetic and personal care products are alcohol (isopropyl), DEA, DMDM hydantoin, FD & C color, fluoride, fragrance, MEA, mineral oil, parabens, polyethylene glycol (PEG), propylene glycol (PG), sodium laureth sulfate (SLES), sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), triclosan and urea hydantoin. Many of these products can be serious carcinogens and hormone-disrupting chemicals.

Because there are no regulations in regard to what is considered to be a "Natural Product," this term is often abused. Often the so-called natural products contain the same dangerous chemicals that they propound that they are replacing.

Dangerous Chemicals in Meat
Many potentially hazardous chemicals are often present in meat products. In the book Poisons in Your Body, by Gary and Steven Null, state some of the things happening in animal factories. "The animals are kept alive and fattened by the continuous administration of tranquilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and 2,700 other drugs. The process starts even before birth and continues long after death. Although these drugs will still be present in the meat when you eat it, the law does not require that they be listed on the package."

Arsenic is often used as a growth stimulant. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that arsenic exceeded the legal limit in 15% of the poultry in the US.

Sodium nitrite and sodium nitrate are chemicals used as preservatives to slow down putrefaction in cured meat, giving meat its bright-red color by reacting with pigments in the blood and muscles. If they are not used, then the meat will have its natural gray-brown color, which wouldn't be good for sales. These chemicals when taken in excess can poison humans, and many people have been poisoned by these chemicals. These chemicals can be especially dangerous to babies and young children. The United Nations' joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee of Food Additives warned, "Nitrate should on no account be added to baby food." AJ Lehman of the FDA pointed out that "only a small margin of safety exists between the amount of nitrate that is safe and that which may be dangerous."

Because of the horrible conditions that the animals to be slaughtered are put through, often they are given vast amounts of antibiotics, which can often create antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be passed to persons who eat the meat. The FDA estimates that penicillin and tetracycline save the meat industry $1.9 billion a year.

Vegetarian Babies
Breast milk is the best food for a newly born child. Breast-feeding is best for a child for the first six months. Breast milk contains substances that protect the baby from disease. If a baby is breast fed as a child, they are less likely to develop allergies when they get older. Breast-feeding is also best for the mother, because it helps the uterus go back to its normal size faster.

Vegetarian woman usually have less contaminants in their breast milk than non-vegetarian women. This is because contaminants are often found in higher levels in the fat and tissues of animals. These contaminants are then past onto the baby in the milk.

Babies less than six months old should only drink breast milk, water or formula. They should not be fed anything else. They should not be given drinks that contain sugar, juices or baby cereal.

Baby formula is usually made from cow milk that has been altered to make it more digestible. Some are made of animal by-products and are often not vegetarian. Some are soy-based and do not contain any animal products. Brands that can be used by vegans include Prosobee, Soyalac and Isamil. Babies should not use regular soy milk, but should use infant formula soy milk.

Usually the first food a baby starts eating is iron-fortified rice cereal, which is easy for a baby to take. At the same time it is best to continue to breast feed the baby. Breast-feeding should be gradually discontinued over a period of time.

When children get older, it is usually best to give them food that is high in fat. This is because their stomachs are smaller than adults, so they may need more dense food. In this way infants get the correct amount of calories. Fat can be added to the diet by adding nut and seed butters to sandwiches. Avocado is also a food high in fat.

Children who are vegetarians are less likely to be overweight because their diet contains more fibers and less fats, saturated fat and cholesterol.