I just watched a few documentaries about veganism. Now I understand why people are vegan. The movies are on Netflix if you want to see them. But, I have to warn you that you may never want to eat meat again. I think I will just eat meat once a week or maybe a few times a month.

These are the names of the videos on Netflix:
Forks over Knifes
Vegucated

If you are doing it for ethical reasons, you should also reduce the amount of milk and eggs you consume. Chickens and dairy cows are treated badly, and arguably, treated worse than pigs and beef cows.

And also, remember to keep track of the amount of protein and calcium you are consuming. If milk and meat are currently your only sources of those nutrients, you make need to replace them.

Red_Rat_Writer:If you are doing it for ethical reasons, you should also reduce the amount of milk and eggs you consume. Chickens and dairy cows are treated badly, and arguably, treated worse than pigs and beef cows.

And also, remember to keep track of the amount of protein and calcium you are consuming. If milk and meat are currently your only sources of those nutrients, you make need to replace them.

I already don't eat eggs or drink milk.

Yah. I will have to make sure that I get enough protein. Green vegetables, nuts, and beans have high protein but animals proteins are more complete proteins. I will do my best and see how it goes.

I heard that many vegans eat flies for vitamin B.

I think I want to be a semi-vegan for ethical reasons as well as health reasons. I used to think that it was healthy to eat animals but now I am questioning that.

Also, it is important that a person doesn't become a carbavore by replacing meat, milk, and eggs with carbs.

I grew up on a pig farm and went to the abattoir a few times. It put me off eating meat for a long time. Now I eat meat again, but only 1x (maximum 2x) a week. Doing it that way means you can spend more on better quality meat with at least some animal welfare responsibility.

I also have two chickens. The eggs they produce are smaller than in the shops, but I get a lot of them and the chickens have a great life.

Yes, if you want to eat meat minimally, there are ethical sources of meat. The meat is quite expensive, but the farmers are not getting rich, it is genuinely expensive to raise an animal in a humane way.

Look for grass-fed beef and pastured chickens, from a farmer who is happy to show you the conditions that the animals live in.

There is an online directory that helps you identify a local farm that sells such meat:
http://www.eatwild.com/products/

Alkanadi:
I heard that many vegans eat flies for vitamin B.

Though one could argue that eating faceless animals, like scallops, can be considered vegan; I don't think that 'flies' would still be in the vegan diet.

There are other sources of B12, the daily value is in my vitamins and there are nutritional yeasts and fortified soymilk.

Also, you guys, that foregoing meat is beneficial for other reasons:
1. Environmentally friendly: Less Co2 emissions from growing plants, less methane from cows.
2. Uses land more efficiently. Cows take up a lot of space, and that space could be used to grow plant food.
3. Uses less water (unless you eat a diet filled with high water plants, like almonds).

Besides ethical reasons which aim on animal rights, my main reason why I'm living vegan is that also human rights are endangered by consuming meat, milk...

Nowadays the world has to deal with a fast growing population and we already know that hundreds of people have no food and that people are starving because of the inmoderate consuming of animal products in richer countries.

Actually the most people don't know that producing 1 kilogramm meat is equal to 10 kilogram corn. This corn could go to starving children instead of fatted cows, pigs etc. So we would face world hunger much better if everybody would realize the consquences of eating meat excessively.

I just want to add this point to the ethical side what doesn't mean that stop eating meat due to animal rights is not reason enough. There are certainly more good reasons than these two ethical ones to reduce consuming of animal products.

There are aesthetic motivations, too ... I am a bike commuter, and I see roadkill a lot. I often think, as I pass the unfortunate animal by, up close and personal, that the meat we eat is not much different - except we cook it and put it on a nice platter. And, of course, slaughterhouses do not exactly induce an appetite. (Does anyone know how horrendously they smell?)

Oddly, I do not have the same visceral reaction to milk - perhaps due to cultural conditioning, and my own quasi-addiction to it. Perhaps someday I will become a vegan or near-vegan. For now, a flesh-less diet works well. And, it tends to be cheaper.

I had been a lacto-ovo vegetarian for about 3 years before switching to full veganism a few months ago, after considering the implications of the dairy and egg industries. Here's some points that really made me think.

During their short lives, animals raised for eggs and milk are treated just as badly as those raised for their meat, often worse. Hens live their entire lives stuffed into cramped battery cages, are mutilated by common practices such as debeaking, and are never permitted to see the light of day. So-called "cage free" production facilities are virtually identical to ordinary factory farms despite their desperate attempts to be reclassified as "humane". And yet many people are attracted to l-o vegetarianism as a safe "death-free" middle ground. Unfortunately this is not the case. Examples of violence which occur in the dairy and egg industries abound:

- In commercial egg hatcheries producing egg-laying hens for factory farms, half of the chicks which hatch are male and therefore useless to the egg industry. Their lives last only a few minutes before they are thrown into an industrial blender to be ground up while still fully alive and conscious, or left to die in the garbage bins.

- Milk cows must be perpetually pregnant in order to continue producing milk. This results in a lot of extra calves, which are typically slaughtered for veal.

- The most blatant way the egg/dairy industry supports slaughter is the simple fact that once an animal's output decreases beyond a certain level the animal is considered "spent" and is sent to a slaughterhouse to be killed for low-grade meat. This occurs after the cow or hen has completed around 20% of her natural lifespan.

If lacto-ovo vegetarianism for you is a stepping stone to a fully plant-based diet, by all means go for it. But in the long run, if you perceive the atrocities committed in modern factory farms as morally outrageous, why would you resolve to simply participate in them less rather then totally forsake them? To be fair, I think any reduction, partial or otherwise, in the consumption of animal products is desirable. Keep in mind that everyone in the world is in a different situation regarding what kinds of food they have access to at all. But if slaughtering animals is unethical it leaves us in kind of a weird moral limbo to say that someone who has the ability to refrain from an unethical activity is justified in only partly doing so.

I've been vegan since January and feel 'better' for it health wise. The only thing I worry about is vitamin B12 which I'm getting from Marmite.