If you’ve eaten meat and animal products your whole life, you might think, why switch to a vegetarian diet? You’ve lived your whole life eating eggs, hamburgers, hot dogs, poultry, so why switch now?

There could be many reasons to switch. Start by looking in the mirror. Are you at a healthy weight? Do you look and feel good most of the time? Do you wake up energized? Or do you wake up tired and sluggish?

How is your general health? Is your blood pressure within a healthy range? Are your cholesterol and blood sugar ranges normal? If they’re not, consider what you’re eating on a daily basis.

How do you feel after eating? Do you feel energized, as if you’ve fed your body what it needs? Or are you tired and dragged out? Do you often need a nap after eating? Is that what food is supposed to do for us, make us tired and sleepy?

Not really. Food should nourish and feed the body and leave us energized and refreshed. The human body is a machine and needs fuel that keeps it running in peak condition. When we’re fat, with high blood pressure, Type II diabetes, high cholesterol and other unhealthy conditions, it’s like a car engine that hasn’t been tuned or isn’t running on the optimal type of gasoline it needs to run efficiently. Your body is the same way. It needs the right kind of fuel to run at peak efficiency, and when you’re eating high-fat meat, or meat that’s been fed antibiotics throughout its life, that’s simply not the kind of fuel the human body evolved to run on.

Try eating vegetarian for a week or a month. See if you don’t feel different, more mentally acute and more physically fit and energized. At least reverse the portion sizes you’ve been eating, and make meat more of a side dish, if you can’t stop eating meat altogether. Even that change can make a big difference in your overall health and well-being.

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If you haven’t been eating a vegetarian diet for years, and want to make the shift, it’s best to do so gradually, in stages. A good way to start is to eliminate red meat and substitute fish or poultry for the red meat you’ve been eating. While it’s not eating more vegetarian, you’re at least eliminating the biggest offender in disease-enhancing foods, red meat.

After you’ve successfully eliminated red meat, then start reducing the amount of poultry you eat. While it’s not as bad for you as red meat, because it’s not as high in fat, it’s still meat that’s been raised on a farm in terrible, cramped and inhumane conditions. Poultry is so laden with growth hormones and antibiotics that’s it’s nothing like a chicken or turkey that we might have hunted for food centuries ago. Chickens are raised in horrible conditions, overfed and then slaughtered.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s just as detrimental to our physical and spiritual health as eating red meat. It’s also fairly easy to eliminate poultry from our diets because let’s face it – it’s like eating wood pulp, it’s so tasteless. All the antibiotics and abnormal living conditions have processed any natural flavor that poultry ever had in the first place.

Add more fish and seafood, if you’re not quite ready to replace poultry with grains and vegetables and legumes yet. While there is risk in eating fish and seafood, because of the high levels of mercury they contain, it’s a better alternative to poultry and red meat. This may be as far as you ever get in moving towards vegetarianism, or at least eliminating meat from your diet. Give yourself time to get used to this. You won’t miss poultry for a minute.

We usually eat chicken and chicken breasts because it’s lower in fat and calories, but it’s also lower in any kind of nutritional value. When we’re not getting essential proteins and vitamins, we’re still starving our bodies, regardless of how healthy we think we’re being. Eliminating poultry is one of the most positive steps you can take towards a healthy diet and a healthy planet.

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If most of us thought about the conditions in which chickens used for meat and eggs are raised and slaughtered, we’d become vegetarian on the spot. Egg-laying chickens can be raised in cages with 6 chickens to a cage, each chicken getting only 67 square inches of space for its lifetime.

Unless they’re certified and labeled as being free-range or organic or natural, they might have been fed growth hormones to get them to slaughter faster, and antibiotics to combat the diseases which come from being raised in cramped and less-than-clean conditions.

And consider what the recommendations are for cleaning up after touching poultry? It’s recommended to clean surfaces with bleach to remove bacteria, and to wash your hands thoroughly after touching a chicken.

Do you really want to put something into your body that requires bleach to clean up after? Something that needs to be cooked to specific temperatures to be sure you’ve destroyed any bacteria that could make you sick?

Chickens and turkeys have become so mass-produced and injected with antibiotics and hormones that there’s no taste to it anymore, so why bother? Even the most humanely treated chicken has either been stunned in a salt-water brine before being beheaded. In John Robbins excellent book and video, Diet for a Small Planet, he shows us pictures of chickens being grabbed in groups by the neck and thrown into cages. Can you really consider eating a chicken with that vision in your head?

Any means of mass-producing animals for human consumption is by its very nature unhealthy and cruel for the animals, and unhealthy for humans as well. Even if you’re of the opinion that man is a natural hunter, how natural is it to eat an animal that’s been raised in captivity and fed a diet of hormones and antibiotics?

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The truth of the spring is that all foods are health foods. The variety of foods that are available has their purpose and uses. The food that grows in one cestuses is a balanced food for that region and is not superior to those that grow in another which is also the food that is express appropriate for that region. Concept is where it should be. No profit of hype and sales pitch could change that, again no matter the try, people will make headway healthy if people eat grease variety and in correct proportions without gorging.

Health foods however is a term used by health proponents in the 1920’s to foods that have special benefits to specific health issues. Health foods for example are those foods that are low in sugar and fat since these are the primary causes of obesity when left unchecked.
What are these?

Unreduced Foods
These are foods farmed as organic in nature. Organic foods for most of human history had been the staple in farming. These are foods farmed without the use of pesticides, herbicides, and insecticides. For livestock, organic orderliness mean that the animals were not injected with antibiotics, are not genetically modified nor growth hormones used in raising them. Directly, there are two basic kinds of farming of organic food. One is the private garden which leave also sell their perfect labeled as organic, the divergent are organic food industries regulated heavily by most governments.

Natural Foods
Natural foods are health foods that are identical in ideal to organic foods although these foods are processed without the use of refined sugar, food coloring, refined flour, and flavorings.

High Fiber Foods
High fiber foods are health foods that have high fiber density. Examples of high fiber foods are berries, cabbages, and fruits and vegetables that have high fiber concentration. The thing that is so important with foods that are high in fiber is that it improves the absorption of nutrients in the body considering it cleanses the digestive system. A clean colon and healthy colon for example prohibits 64 different kinds of diseases that would otherwise afflict the body when the gunk and the refuse connections the system are not flushed out.

Omega 3 rich foods

Unlike foods that are low fat and low sugar, foods rich in Omega 3 are agreeable sources of essential fatty acids whose benefits are too numerous to name. Some of the benefits of foods rich in omega 3 are that it has excellent anti aging qualities, is a select cancer retardant, good for heart problems, skin, hair, metabolism, rheumatism, sound for the memory and acumen health, etc. What is good about these foods is that it is everywhere again is not expensive. Examples of foods are, Avocado, berries, soya beans and soybean oil, flaxseeds and flaxseed oil, pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, olive oil, Brazil nuts, tofu etc.

Vegetables like, broccoli, stamp out, kidney beans, green beans, lettuce, cauliflowers are very rich in Omega 3. Likewise fish especially the cold spray / fatty variety are excellent sources of Omega 3. Some of the fish are the trout, swordfish, milkfish, salmon, mackerel, herring, and Albacore tuna.

Health foods are everywhere. Those mention here are just a few of the examples but mostly the healthiest and among the best. Dieting through health foods is as easy as picking the next choice.

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