For most, meat is the central ingredient of meals.

In fact, the food pyramid taught us to include meat, but what if you really didn’t need meat to complete a diet after all?

Let’s find what could happen to your body when you give up meat.

1. You’ll Have Less Inflammation

People who suffer from diseases and disorders of various types often complain that they experience some form of inflammation…

Meats, especially those that have been processed or filled with preservatives can increase the amount of acidity and inflammation in the body.

Although it is not proven that inflammation causes cardiovascular disease, inflammation is common for heart disease and stroke patients and is thought to be a sign or atherogenic response. It’s important to know what inflammation is and what it can do to your heart. Read Inflammation and Heart Diseases.

One major surprise came when they tested people who avoided meat entirely, and it became obvious that people with a primarily plant-based diet tended to avoid many of those illnesses.

According to the researchers, they believe that this outcome was due to the plant-based diets, which by nature and natural composition tend to be anti-inflammatory.

See Resources 1 and 2.

2. It Lowers Cholesterol

If you’ve been keeping up on current events, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the rise in high cholesterol around the world.

Much of this is probably the result of the increase in consumption of convenience foods.

As people become busier, we are cooking less frequently at home, and larger numbers of us are consuming processed foods.

Foods high in bad cholesterol play a big part in the formation of fat deposits in the vascular system.

Cholesterol which is intended to act as a carrier for many fats in your body now simply attracts free floating fat cells that easily get stuck together where they can form barriers to blood flow.

If these barriers keep too much blood from flowing to organs like the brain, then a stroke is likely to occur.

Plants based diets encourage your body to eliminate these fats by carrying them to disposal sites like lymph glands.

The lymphatic system is responsible for the removal of waste, toxins, and harmful material/organisms from the tissues, including excess fat.

3. It May Reduce Your Risk for Cataracts

According to studies carried about by multiple groups, diet can be a factor in the development of cataracts.

Some of these health professionals believe that the tissues that form and help cloud the eyes are partially due to the fats, degenerated tissues and other wastes that haven’t been expelled by the body under normal circumstances.

Having a higher amount of the right foods in your diet can help your body to work on a more efficient level.

Vegans had the lowest possible risk of cataracts, 40 per cent lower than meat-eaters. … The conclusion of her study was that high intakes of fruit and vegetables as well as vitamins C and E (the sources of which are plant–based foods) are associated with a significantly lower risk of cataracts. See Viva Health: Cataracts

With a balance of diet and proper exercise that can help to mechanically agitated stagnating tissue particles, you can make it easier for your body to rid itself of the dead cells, and poisons that would later become a problem.

By being added to an obstruction, many of the plant cholesterols have also been proven to be more effective at removing LDL cholesterol from the bloodstream.

4. It Can Boost Your Skin

Do you want to have healthier skin?

Experts say that one of the best ways to do that would be to cut back or stop eating meat altogether.

See A Vegan Diet Could Do Wonders To Your Skin – Here’s Why

One reason is that the added stress from processing the chemicals contained in meat, and the strain that it puts on your system from extra fats and sodium might be too much for any healthy body to deal with.

Meat needs to go through a few changes before it can be eaten by people, and the first is usually cooking.

1. Cooking meat liquefies fats, which are then changed on a molecular level by the heating process.
2. These fats can become new compounds that aren’t very good for you, so even when you eat meat, the amounts should be kept to a lesser amount.

Fresh fruits and vegetables on the other hand can be eaten right off of the plant that they come from.

Raw fruits and vegetables retain a lot more of their nutritional value, so any time you can make it possible to have these raw foods as a part of your meals, you’re doing the most you can to get the vitamins and minerals that you need.

That’s a major contrast to meats, which are normally very unsafe to eat raw because they can carry harmful bacteria and parasites that the cooking process helps you to avoid.

5. There is a Reduced Risk of Type 2 Diabetes

The types of food that you eat can also have a profound effect on your blood sugar.

There are still a large portion of the population who have not been diagnosed as having pre-diabetic symptoms, but they’re out there.

The habits and customs of specific groups have given a lot of insight into the drastic ways in which your health can be affected in not only the short term, but also the long term, because there are illnesses that can occur simply from going long periods without obtaining the complete nutrition that your genome was raised on.

Diabetes continue to be more common among those eating meat.

6. Plant Protein Is Easier on Your Body

When extra proteins are discovered by your body, they can end up being treated as wastes that your system has to flush out.

Animal protein have a more difficult time being utilized and broken down by the body for a variety of reasons.

When these extra proteins go unused, anything that isn’t treated as waste will be stored as fats, and these fats can have some unpleasant effects once they reach your bloodstream.

These types of proteins are also closely linked to outbreaks of inflammation that can lower your quality of life, and create fertile circumstances for disease and illnesses.

Keeping your protein at an accessible, proper level will put you in a more efficient state of operation.

7. You’ll Have a Healthy Microbiome

People can always follow dieting trends or the latest advice from the newest crop of fads, but few people listen to their body in a biological sense.

It’s easy to forget that you gut contains an entire system of microorganisms that it uses to carry out all sorts of functions in your body.

If you don’t pay close attention to what you gut is doing, you could end up very sick and develop a seemingly random assortment of illnesses.

The gut has a massive role in helping manage quite a few different systems that your body needs to work properly each day.

That means keeping your gut flora healthy so that they can perform their tasks.

Without a proper balance of these bacteria, harmful strains could make you sick, or you could develop weight issues, or autoimmune disease.

When you eat plants, they naturally support this system.

Another important issues, is that these living organisms make it possible for you to eat certain foods and digest them without having to use some kind of external system.

The important thing to learn from this though, is that without this part of your body, few of the foods you enjoy today would be possible.

8. There Can Be Metabolic Advantages

As it was mentioned before, foods that are primarily vegetarian in content tend to be a lot easier for you to digest, and when your body doesn’t have to work as hard, you could say that your metabolism is working on a more efficient level than it was previously.

A highly functional metabolism will help you to lose and keep weight off because it’s burning and utilizing the food you eat in proper ways.

People who eat vegan diets are usually among those with the fastest metabolic functions.

9. You May Save Money

People tend to think of vegan or vegetarian lifestyles as being more expensive, but it turns out the exactly the opposite is true.

Animal based foods have to go through a lot more steps to make them safe compared to plant-based foods.

This results in you eating a lot more preservatives than you would if you had eaten something fresh from a tree.

These pre-made foods generally put a lot of money in the advertising and packaging, so that a large portion of what you pay for is the presentation of the snack food.

Animal products like milk and cheese require a lot of power and resources to make, so they’re more expensive to buy than a few fresh vegetables.

10. It Can Help You Maintain Your Weight

Animal proteins have a way of hanging around in your system for quite some time.

These fats can float around and stick to other fats, get stuck in places, or just gather up around our stomach, but a solid diet of the right plants can help you have a lot of energy and keep your metabolism working hard and on time.

Some foods can slow you down so much that they take hours or even a day to digest.

This kind of handicapping of your metabolism can have disaster effects on your body over time, so a lot of exercise could be the answer to preventing those possibilities.

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