Healthy Lifestyle

Benefits of Meatless Monday for Your Health And The Planet.

How can you make a significant impact by adding a Meatless Monday to your diet?
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Meatless Monday is a global movement with a mission to encourage people to reduce meat in their diet for their and their planet’s health. It is a simple message – Skip meat at least once a week. Why Monday? Because researchers found out that on Mondays people are most likely to make positive changes. Finally, the goal is to let people see the positive change in their bodies and how healthier they feel after Meatless Monday, so they extend the practice to other days.

What is Meatless Monday?

Meatless Monday became popular and accepted worldwide, so now it is used in schools, hospitals, restaurants, and whole communities in over 40 countries. It started in 2018 as a movement to reduce meat consumption, and it is doing great ever since!

There is plenty of free advertising material, ideas, and guides about Meatless Monday that can help you participate in this global movement with a better understanding. Or you can ask any vegan, and they will be more than happy to help you out and give you some tips from their experience.

Vegan is just pure love. Love for animals, love for the planet, and love for yourself.
Mischa Temaul

Believe it or not, there is a history behind the Meatless Monday dating from World War I. Just it was a Meatless Tuesday instead of Monday. The 31st president of the United States, Herbert Hoover, introduced Meatless Monday to the public, to save food and reduce consumption. It was wartime, and there was a problem with food, so it was applied everywhere. In households, restaurants, hotels, and all public areas. In one week in New York City hotels, 96,75 tons of meat were saved. Now you see how much just one day contributes to the final goal.

Also Read: This is Why You Should Go for Meatless Meals.

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Benefits of Meatless Monday

Eating less meat reduces your ecological footprint. Meat production is responsible for making our environment unhealthy due to deforestation, pollution, excessive water consumption, destroying whole ecosystems, destroying natural habitats, etc.

While it is also responsible for health issues such as diabetes, heart diseases, colon cancer, antibiotic resistance, obesity, and many more. Animal products are high in saturated fat, which is responsible for high blood pressure and can lead to cardiovascular diseases.

meatfreemealsA study showed that vegans have lower rates of cancer than meat-eaters. One meatless day per week will have a positive impact on your whole body. First, you will say: β€œI can do that” and see how easy it is. Secondly, you will feel easy and light after plant-based meals, and in that way understand how harmful the meat is.
Meat is not designed for human use. We have a problem digesting it, that is why people feel full and overloaded and have problems with stomach blocking.

Purpose behind

Meatless Monday is just an elegant way to drag you into the plant-based world, having a hidden goal to leave you there. However, even if you stay on having meat once a week, you’re still making a visible contribution.

But the highest purpose and benefit of all is ethical – You save an animal!
According to the Vegan Calculator metrics, by not eating an animal or animal products for a single day, you save:

  • One animal life
  • 1,100 gallons of water
  • 40 pounds of grain
  • 30 square feet of forest

There are approximately 52 Mondays per week, so do the math yourself, how much you actually save by joining the Meatless Monday Movement.

What should you eat on Meatless Monday?

Is Meatless Monday dedicated only to meat, or to all animal products?

Since this movement is about protecting our environment and our health, and animal products are not sustainable or healthy, we highly encourage you to go fully plant-based on Meatless Mondays. So, no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy, no supermarket products with sneaky ingredients, just a simple plant-based meal.

It was never been easier to have a plant-based diet, as it used to be in the past. Now you have plenty of vegan options in markets, vegan milk, cheeses, vegan meats, vegan options in restaurants, so you will not miss a thing during one day of being vegan.

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Just keep going, your effort isn’t unnoticed

Every beginning is hard, and most people aren’t aware of what plant-based means, and what they can eat. That is why you should use all the free resources online to educate yourself and see that there is nothing complicated about it. When looking for products, search for β€œVegan” or β€œPlant-based” labels, as all vegan products proudly highlight the Vegan sign. You will not have to read tons of ingredients as it used to be the case in the past, where animal products were usually hidden under some sneaky names.

But to help you out at the beginning, we found a very delicious menu that you can use for your Meatless Mondays, which is 100% vegan. After this kind of menu, you will understand that you will never miss meat again. The menu for 12 Meatless Mondays you can find on this link.

After a while, when you dive into the vegan world and various choices, you will start to explore different tastes and foods by yourself.

Conclusion

The change begins within us. Small steps are always noted somewhere, and every contribution is a positive sparkle to our environment and our health.

Encourage your friends and family. Or even better, challenge them to go vegan once per week. Try to educate them, and explain why it is good for them. Surely everyone will be happy to join in some positive movement. Our mission should be spreading awareness and making this planet a better place by securing its future. Go vegan!

Author

A professional writer with a Bachelor's degree in Hotel and Event Management. Runs an eco-friendly blog, which is about everything connected to nature, ecology, sustainability, people, animals, and the environment.