I don't doubt that "Vegetarian diets HEALTHIER IN EVERY WAY than diets with meat", but is the other side convinced?

In 1989, my friend Greg and I heard John Robbins speak in San Diego. He recently had appeared on Geraldo, and was citing the scientific evidence that the cause of heart disease, cancer, etc. was animal products...and not once did the autopsies blame spinach and tofu!

The evidence supporting veganism has continued to mount since then, but that didn't stop the Atkins craze from a decade ago.

Like the scientific evidence in favor of global warming, the right wing doesn't take medical data supporting veganism, Dr. Milton Mills' anatomical comparisons between humans, carnivores, omnivores, frugivores, and herbivores, The China Study, etc. seriously, either.

They liken it to a scene in Woody Allen's 1973 movie Sleeper, in which a natural foods faddist goes into suspended animation and wakes up 200 years later to find that what he thought would be the wave of the future didn't happen.

Maybe they believe in a six thousand year old universe, too?

They're intolerant of other religions, and even other Christian sects or denominations which differ from their own. They act like they've never encountered a vegetarian before, are unaware of animal rights as a secular moral philsophy, etc.

They think of vegetarianism as following "dietary laws", even though animal issues like fur, circuses, "sport" hunting, vivisection (animal experimentation), etc. have nothing to do with diet, eating, or food.

On the other hand, why then would they be offended by pro-choice vegetarians and vegans (persons valuing animal life over humans in prenatal development) if veg*ism were merely abstaining from certain foods, and not about the animals' right to life?

Volunteering with San Diego Animal Advocates in 1988, by manning a booth or table at Koby's Swap Meet (a local flea market), I met an animal activist who said she first became vegetarian for health reasons.

She explained that she didn't think an occasional piece of meat during the holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.) would hurt...

...but when she learned about slaughterhouses, factory farms, etc., she said she'll never eat meat again.

Elliot Gang, who wrote for the now-defunct Animals' Agenda, said to myself and Gaverick Matheny of Vegan Action at the World Vegetarian Day festival in San Francisco in 2000:

"Arguing it's wrong to eat meat because it's unhealthy is like saying rape is wrong because you might catch venereal disease."

In each case, the moral reasons are the real reason to abstain. Because we live in a narcissistic society, Americans are won over by the health arguments first.

During the Second World War, when rationing forced England to adopt a vegetarian diet, George Bernard Shaw reassured his countrymen that they need not worry about becoming carbon copies of George Bernard Shaw..

...they can keep their own identities, just as the Maoris did when they gave up cannibalism. And the laborers making a living from cutting the throats of chickens, lambs, calves, pigs, etc. can refine themselves in nobler ways.

Apart from demanding animal issues be given the level of serious moral discussion we now give to issues like racism and abortion, we have many powerful social justice arguments (global hunger, global warming; the energy, environmental, population and water crises) on our side.

Soooo many ways to go veg. The most obvious is for ethics, then environment, hunger, and finally health and intelligence. And you will be in good company, there are people like the great
Thales, Pythagoras, Euclid, Socrates, Plato, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, Euler, Ramanujan, Subramanyam Chandrashekhar, Bose (actually Bose was pesco, but he's the only pesco here), Abdul Kalam, Gandhi, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Planck, Dirac, Fermi,...

The most wonderful thing I see is that when 1 large community of people turn veg, people from that community are going to be really successful, as shown above.

And by the way, no offense, but I think I saw ads advertising leather shoes on your site. Just get rid of them!!!