Why Eat Vegetarian?

We now live in a world of salmonella-tainted chickens, listeria-covered cheese, and beef burgers laced with estrogenic hormones and residues of potent antibiotics.

Many concerned people an- worried about the high incidence of health threats that are linked to improper diet such as heart attacks, strokes, birth defects, leukemia, other cancers,, diabetes and high blood pressure. The list goes on and on.

Until recently fish has been advised, as a healing substitute for meat in the diet, but now this alternative has a big question mark against it. Fish flesh and fish oil, are now known to contain toxic chemical pollutants.

Consider this. Pollutants (which come from spraying crops), wash down from the fields into the rivers and streams and finally spill into the ocean where they find their way into bodies of frees swimming and bottom-dwelling fish.

Radioactivity from nuclear pollution, via the power plants that are built along rivers, also affects fish. Waste spillage from transport trucks, pipe leak etc., can result in radioactive contamination of the waterways. Few U.S. waters, in fact any waters, are free of hydrocarbon or heavy-metal pollution and these pollutants concentrate in the muscle tissue of fish. This is fact not fantasy. Eating a one-pound fish from Lake Ontario is equivalent to drinking 1.5 million quarts of that polluted water!

Consumers have little way of knowing where the fish they buy comes from, or where it has been.

How about chicken? American consumption of this delicacy is enormous and, people feel justified because they are not eating red meat, (everyone reading; this newsletter knows the disasters of that), but chicken as a substitute is ill advised. Chickens are fed female hormones like estrogens to increase plumpness" and market weight

The Salmonella bacterial contamination of chicken is a severe threat to the public health. Infection from this bacteria can cause severe dehydrating diarrhea, lingering arthritis, infection of the lungs and nervous system and not infrequently death.

Yet people in transition, or the would-be but not quite convinced vegetarians, continue to ask, "From what source do we derive our protein?"

Here is a list of high-protein foods that are available without invading the animal or bird kingdoms:

Whole algae grains (sprouted or cooked), buckwheat, millet, amaranth, quinoa, chick peas, alfalfa sprouts, mungs, hummus, and avocado. Nuts and seeds such as sunflower, sesame, seed cheeses, and almonds.

Vol 8 Issue 2 Page 3