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Vegan FAQs

Find the answer to the most common questions, myths and arguments about veganism.

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Veganism

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Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.


There are many ways to embrace vegan living. Yet one thing all vegans have in common is a plant-based diet avoiding all animal foods such as meat (including fish, shellfish and insects), dairy, eggs and honey - as well as products like leather and any tested on animals.
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It's probably much easier than you think!

Let’s be honest. If you grew up eating meat, milk, and eggs in almost every meal, the idea of going vegan certainly seems hard—maybe even impossible!

But most vegans discover the switch is far easier than they ever imagined. All you have to do is focus on crowding out animal-based foods rather than cutting them out. That is, don’t eliminate a meat, dairy, or egg product from your diet until you’ve found two or three great new vegan foods than can take its place. When you focus on crowding rather than cutting, you eliminate all feelings of strain and sacrifice. Your diet actually becomes more interesting, varied, and delicious as you fill it with more and more vegan foods.

Some ideas for beginning your transition:

Remember that you’re not the first person to do this, so you don’t have to figure it all out by yourself. Read vegan related books to help you find the answers to your questions, you can visit out Must Read page to find out books.


Don’t put pressure on yourself. Just make a point of constantly trying new vegan foods, and move at whatever speed you feel comfortable. If you make a mistake and end up consuming animal products, don’t call the whole thing off. You’ll find that over time, it gets easier and easier to stick with a mostly or entirely vegan diet.

Vegan answers

Nutrition

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You'll soon find a whole new world of exciting foods and flavours opening up to you. A vegan diet is richly diverse and comprises all kinds of fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, seeds, beans and pulses - all of which can be prepared in endless combinations that will ensure you're never bored. From curry to cake, pasties to pizzas, all your favourite things can be suitable for a vegan diet if they're made with plant-based ingredients. Check out our vegan recipes for ideas.

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Despite what you may have heard, protein is actually not much of a worry for most vegans.

Not so long ago, conventional wisdom had it that vegans and vegetarians would inevitably develop dangerous protein deficiencies. But over time this myth has largely died out, doubtless due to the fact that have been virtually no instances of vegans dropping dead from lack of protein.

Unfortunately, a harmful counter-myth has arisen within the vegan world: that plant-based foods are so loaded with protein that vegans need never give the topic a thought. That’s an unreasonable belief that has set a lot of vegans up for inadequate protein intake, even if they’ll never be hospitalized for deficiency. Protein is a vital nutrient and falling short of your needs is harmful in a variety of ways. So it’s worth making sure you’re incorporating several rich sources of protein into your everyday diet. Here are some protein-rich vegan foods that will help ensure your needs are met.

  • Legumes (alfalfa, clover, beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, lupins, soybeans, peanuts, etc)
  • Seitan
  • Nuts
  • Tofu
  • Quinoa
  • Tempeh
  • Edamame
  • Nutritional Yeast
  • Hempseed
  • Spirulina
  • Oats and Oatmeal
  • Wild Rice
  • Chia Seeds
  • Protein-Rich Vegetables (broccoli, spinach, asparagus, artichokes, potatoes, sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts)

Maybe the best approach to making this happen is to make sure that most of your meals include a solid source of protein. That can mean using nuts, seeds, or gomasio as a garnish. It could mean adding sautéed tempeh or vegan meats to your spaghetti sauce. Or it could mean making a side-dish of fried tofu mixed with a little barbecue sauce and a dusting of nutritional yeast. If you construct your diet with protein in mind, you’ll find an abundance of vegan foods to meet your needs. But protein is just the start of nutrients worth paying attention to: also keep an eye on zinc, iron, calcium, and especially Vitamin B-12. For more on these and other nutrients, visit our vegan nutrition page.

Vegan answers

Health

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Some research has linked vegan diets with lower blood pressure and cholesterol, and lower rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some types of cancer. You can eat a totally plant-based diet that supports excellent health, whilst helping animals and protecting the planet.

Animals

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Total estimate of animal killed per year

These are the numbers of animals killed worldwide by the meat, egg, and dairy industries since you opened this webpage. They do not include the millions of animals killed in laboratories, fur farms, animal shelters, zoos, marine parks, rodeos, circuses, human negligence, blood sports, or extermination attempts.

Check more vegan stats »

Wild Fish Caught1.008.000.000.000
Chickens61.171.973.510
Ducks2.887.594.480
Pigs1.451.856.889
Rabbits1.171.578.000
Geese687.147.000
Turkeys618.086.890
Sheep536.742.256
Goats438.320.370
Cattle298.799.160
Rodents70.371.000
Pigeons and other Birds59.656.000
Buffalo25.798.819
Horses4.863.367
Camels3.243.266
Donkeys3.213.400
FAOSTATFish count estimates (fishcount.org.uk)
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Would it be alright to kill and eat people if they’d had a good life? And what do we mean by a ‘good’ life, anyway? In the case of animals, we certainly don’t mean a long one. ‘Meat’ animals are killed as babies in the case of pigs and lambs between 6 - 8 months old - never get to lead any kind of adult life. Animals, of course, want to live just as much as we do. The first instinct every animal has is to survive. By killing them at all, we are taking away from them the most important thing they have; we are denying their intrinsic right to life.

It is also naïve to imagine that any farmed animals lead good lives: the overwhelming majority of them are exploited, neglected and frustrated on factory farms – forced to lead lives of misery by a farming systems which sees them only as ways of producing a profit. They then face a violent, frightening death in the slaughterhouse: despite supposedly humane stunning, millions of animals are still conscious when their throats are cut. Even free range and organic animals suffer on farms and they face the same shocking death at a young age as factory-farmed animals.

Learn more about factory farms
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This is a very intricate question to answer. Although there are different calculation methods out there, we've come up with a different approach. We've have collected the consumption of animals per region and calculated a weighted average between the animals consumed per year per region and the total population of the world. This numbers came up to be:

1 Day5 Days1 Month1 Year
0.221780

Animal save calculator »Animals consumed per region statistics »

Environment

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In an industrial beef production system, it takes on average three years before the animal is slaughtered to produce about 200 kg of boneless beef. The animal consumes nearly 1,300 kg of grains (wheat, oats, barley, corn, dry peas, soybean meal and other small grains), 7,200 kg of roughages (pasture, dry hay, silage and other roughages), 24 cubic metres of water for drinking and 7 cubic metres of water for servicing. This means that to produce one kilogram of boneless beef, we use about 6.5 kg of grain, 36 kg of roughages, and 155 litres of water (only for drinking and servicing). Producing the volume of feed requires about 15,300 litres of water on average. The water footprint of 1 kg of beef thus adds up to 15,500 litres of water

The water footprint of food
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Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, or 51% of all worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.

Livestock and Climate ChangeStudy claims meat creates half of all greenhouse gases
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The production of meat and other animal products places a heavy burden on the environment - from crops and water required to feed the animals, to the transport and other processes involved from farm to fork. The vast amount of grain feed required for meat production is a significant contributor to deforestation, habitat loss and species extinction. In Brazil alone, the equivalent of 5.6 million acres of land is used to grow soya beans for animals in Europe. This land contributes to developing world malnutrition by driving impoverished populations to grow cash crops for animal feed, rather than food for themselves. On the other hand, considerably lower quantities of crops and water are required to sustain a vegan diet, making the switch to veganism one of the easiest, most enjoyable and most effective ways to reduce our impact on the environment.

Check out the Vegan Facts page for more information »

Miscellaneous

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Plants do not feel pain. A plant lacks a central nervous system, pain receptors and a brain which means that they don’t have the ability to feel pain as we or other type of animals do.

Even if plants did feel pain, the average meat eater is responsible for ten times more plants being killed than vegans do, because all the animals that are bred for meat, dairy and egg eaters, eat huge amounts of plants themselves. It takes up to 12 kilograms of plants to create 1 kilogram of animal flesh 1 , meaning vastly more plants are killed in the production of animal products than they are vegan products.

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