The most common reason for vegetarianism is for a better health. A well-balanced vegetarian diet is very healthy, and can help to prevent/control a number of health problems, including: high cholesterol, obesity, diabetes.

A vegetarian is a person who does not consume meat, including, beef, chicken, pork, or fish. Some vegetarians may or may not choose to eat animal products such as eggs, milk, gelatin, or honey. There are different types of vegetarians:

1. Lacto-ovo vegetarian
Lacto-ovo vegetarians eat no meat but do eat eggs and dairy products (ovo means eggs and lacto means dairy).

2. Lacto vegetarian
Lacto vegetarians eat no meat but do eat dairy products.

3. Ovo vegetarian
Lacto vegetarians eat no meat but do eat eggs.

Reasons to Become a Vegetarian:

1. Vegetarians live longer, healthier lives. That’s a fact. Modern medicine can prolong life and medical science is keeping people alive who would die without transplants, bypasses etc; but what of the quality of life? It’s simpler not to eat meat.
2. Your body is designed for a vegetarian diet. The human intestines are 16-29 feet long and winds round and round. This is typical of a herbivore (grass eaters). Carnivores always have short, straight intestines. This means they pass out the write from the meat before it rots. In humans it remains in the digestive system too long.
3. Agricultural Chemicals. Being higher on the food chain, animal foods contain far higher concentrations of agricultural chemicals than plant foods, including pesticides, herbicides, etc.
4. Cancer prevention. Of all the natural cancer prevention substances found: vitamin C, B-17, hydroquionenes, beta carotene, NDGA, – none has been found to be animal derived. Yet most meats, when cooked, produce an array of benzenes and other carcinogenic compounds. Cancer is infinitely easier to prevent than cure. Soybeans contain protease inhibitor, a powerful anticancer compound. You won’t find it in useful quantities in animal based food.
5. Vegetarians eat more fibre. The average Americans eat only 12 grams of fibre a day in their diet. Dietary recommendations call for 3040 grams a day. The more you follow the American diet the more you risk colon cancer. Vegetarians will easily exceed this recommended level.
6. The more plant foods you eat the less room you have for meat food, which clogs the arteries with cholesterol and strain the kidneys with excess protein and burden the heart with saturated fat.
7. Exposure to livestock drugs. There are over 20,000 different drugs, including sterols, antibiotics, growth hormones and other veterinary drugs that are given to livestock animals. These drugs are consumed when animal foods are consumed. The dangers herein, in secondary consumption of antibiotics, are well documented.
8. Animal foods are high in sodium, which causes the blood to retain water. They also cause plaque to build up in the arteries. One in four people in the Singapore has high blood pressure.
9. Environmental Reasons for Vegetarianism: Raising animals for food wastes resources, because food gives up only part of its energy to the eater. When chickens eat grain, they get part of its energy. When humans eat chicken, they get only a part of the energy that the chicken got from the grain. By cutting out the “middle chicken” and eating the grain directly, humans get more energy, and more people can get fed.
10. Vegetarianism is moral and ethical: give the devastating consequences of meat eating on an individual, social and ecological level, as thinking, caring beings we should choose vegetarianism. Many great philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, Leo Tolstoy, and George Bernard Shaw have taught the morality of vegetarianism.