Vegetarian Motivations or Barriers

In a study released by The Lancet Oncology, Dean Ornish, M.D. and his colleagues found that comprehensive lifestyle changes, including a low-fat vegan diet, increase the body's ability to fight premature aging, cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses.

This research found that children with higher intelligence, as measured through intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, are more likely to report being vegetarian as adults. Evidence of the potential benefits of a vegetarian diet to the heart may also explain why higher IQ children or adolescents have a reduced risk of coronary disease in adult life.

This 1989 MORI poll conducted on behalf of The Sunday Times found that 3% of the population of the United Kingdom are vegetarians; another 2% of respondents said they had been vegetarian in the past. The primary motivations for vegetarianism included concerns for animal welfare, health, and cost.

A nationwide poll regarding the environment shows that the majority of U.S. adults believe their personal actions are significant for protecting the environment, but slightly more than half have not heard of "environmental sustainability." Other behaviors related to the environment were also covered in this study.

Consumers are largely isolated from the moral implications of their choices by numerous mechanisms that allow them to dissociate their use of animals from the suffering of animals. The literature review portion of this thesis examines the psychological and cultural constructs that present unique challenges to animal rights as a social movement. From that contextual backdrop, this thesis then evaluates consumer response to three major campaigns conducted by HSUS and PETA between 1980 and the present. The campaigns are vegetarianism and factory farming, the anti-fur movement, and the campaign against cosmetics testing on animals. While consumer response has been mixed, there are other outcomes from those campaigns that signal broader cultural changes. [Excepted from report]

More than one million Taiwanese people, including some political figures, have pledged to reduce carbon emissions by becoming vegetarian. This would reduce at least 1.5 million tons of carbon emissions in Taiwan during the course of one year.

Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet, while an estimated 4 billion live primarily on a plant-based diet. The US food production system uses about 50% of the total US land area, 80% of the fresh water, and 17% of the fossil energy used in the country... The meat-based food system requires more energy, land, and water resources than the lactoovovegetarian diet. In this limited sense, the lactoovovegetarian diet is more sustainable than the average American meat-based diet. [Abstract excerpted from article]

A survey released by Swedish Glace shows that about one in 10 adults in the United Kingdom is either vegetarian or vegan, but almost the same proportion of people have tried vegetarianism or veganism and have gone back to eating meat.

In this essay, Austrian animal advocate Martin Balluch argues that reform-based and abolition-based animal advocacy are inextricably linked in a "welfare-rights continuum" that makes it very difficult to achieve meaningful change through public education and persuasion. Instead, Balluch argues, widespread change for animals will only come through altering the system itself, by changing the balance of power and codifying animal-friendly laws and policies. [Note: Balluch welcomes comments and feedback on his essay at vgt@vgt.at]