If you eat meat, or know someone who does, please pass this video on to them. This video depicts the way animals are used and abused for human consumption. It is disgusting from a health perspective. From a compassion/decency standpoint, it is simply horrifying.

Meet Your Meat–PETA Video

Health Reasons to Eat a Vegan Diet

• Who wants to eat something that is overweight and diseased? (Most cattle are lame by the time they are put on the truck to head to the slaughterhouse. Their legs cannot support the weight they must carry from being overfed and "fattened up.")
• Do you really want to eat something that contains antibiotics, hormones, and perhaps pieces of other animals? (cows are often fed the dead remnants of other animals)
• Up to 90% of hens have broken bones or are hemorrhaging by the time they make it to slaughter. Do you want to eat something that is hemorrhaging or has broken bones (conditions that affect the surrounding tissues)?
• Once an animal dies, its flesh begins rotting. You are eating something that becomes more rotten with each passing day.
• Meat acidifies the body (disease thrives in an acidic environment) and contributes to cholesterol formation, heart attacks and clogged arteries.
• Red meat consumption doubles the risk of colon cancer. (The body has to work very hard to eliminate the animal waste from the colon, and often the body can't eliminate fast enough, because more meat is continually being added.)

Want more reasons?

Additional reasons courtesy of Adrian Cooper

• Meat contains many dangerous chemical substances such as: carcinogenic growth hormones, DDT, preservatives, tranquilizers, hormones and other drugs fed to animals, arsenic, sodium sulphate and numerous other chemical compound used in livestock farming, all of which are consumed with meat.
• The "run-off" from thousands of "slaughter-houses", an extremely evocative phrase, is a major pollutant of rivers, streams and lakes; thereby causing further suffering, death and destruction.
• Rain forests are being levelled at an unsustainable rate to provide land for cattle, and also to grow soy beans to feed cattle, thus further damaging the environment.
• 20% of all methane, a major contributor to climate change, is produced by cattle.
• Vegetarian and vegans have considerably more endurance and stamina. It has been medically proven that that, on average, a vegetarian or vegan has 2 to 3 times more endurance during physical exercise than a comparable meat eater, and will recover from that exercise up to 5 times faster than the comparable animal eater.
• Vegans live on average 5 to 7 years longer than meat eaters.
• The proteins originating in vegetables, fruits and nuts are in a far more readily available and digestible form than than "meat protein." This is why the world's largest mammals such as elephants, rhinoceros, giraffe and many others can grow so large.
• The amino acids required by the human body to physically repair itself, under "instruction" from the energy body are found in vegetation, fruits, nuts, etc.
• Human teeth are designed for grinding and chewing in exactly the same manner as a herbivorous animal.
• Humans have no teeth that are characteristic of carnivorous animals as used for tearing flesh.
• The human hand has no claws or thumb designed for handling meat. Our hands and fingers are rather designed for harvesting vegetables, fruits, nuts etc.
• The strength of hydrochloric acid in the human stomach, the acid used to break down food into a digestible form, is only 5% of the strength of hydrochloric acid found in carnivorous animals. This is because vegetation is much easier to "break down" than meat.
• The alimentary canal, which is the entire digestive canal of a human is many times longer in comparison to body size than the alimentary canal of a carnivore. This is so a meat eating animal can eliminate putrefying meat as as soon as possible, a requirement that does not apply to vegetation. This is one major reason why cancer of the colon is rapidly increasing in human beings, as well as other related digestive tract diseases.
• Humans are unable to deal with excess fat in the same way that carnivorous animals are. This is a major reason why, due to eating meat, humans are increasingly paying the price in the form of obesity, heart diseases such as hardening and obstruction of the arteries, and related diseases such as diabetes. These are all increasing as parents feed children more and more harmful food. It should also be noted that a child produces most fat cells in the body at a young age, and once produced these fat cells will always exist and have the ability to manifest as fat. So once a child has been "fattened" by parents, they will be fighting against obesity and fat related diseases all their physical life. An obese child will always become an obese adult.
• When we consume a vegan diet we also consume an ideal balance of other crucial substances such as carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, chlorophyll and numerous others.