“I’m going vegetarian for Lent,” a friend enthusiastically informed me over lunch. “Wonderful! I will share my best plant-based recipes with you, most are quite healthy!” I responded earnestly. She seemed a touch offended. “I do not want to be vegetarian for health reasons because that would be selfish. I am abstaining from meat for justice, especially care for creation.” I saw her point but mused that caring for one’s health is not necessarily selfish.
Similar to my friend, I would avoid talking about veganism from a health standpoint. It felt excessively self-centered. I was only doing something good because I benefited from it. But now that I see my body through the lens of faith, veganism is how I live authentically as a Catholic.
The Catholic faith deeply reveres our earthly bodies. God took on human flesh through the Incarnation. Through Jesus’ Resurrection, we believe that our bodies will be resurrected at the end of time. The body then is not a temporary prison for the immortal soul that is discarded when we die. Instead, we profess in the Creed that our bodies will be resurrected on the last day.
Saint Paul writes, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body.” (1 Cor 6: 19-20) Though Saint Paul is talking about sexual morality in this passage, we can extend Paul’s exhortations to encompass all dishonorable uses of our bodies. If the Spirit dwells in our bodies, we must keep it healthy not just sexually, but physically as well. In some ways, lust and gluttony are closely related through their connection to uncontrolled physical appetites.
Moreover, as created beings, our bodies are a gift from God. In an act of love and not out of any necessity, God created us in His image. Consequently, caring for our physical health honors God’s gift to us. Gratitude for this gift and love for the giver motivates us to show deep reverence and care for our bodies. The only return we can make to this priceless gift is to use it as God intended it, for his greater glory.
Finally, our bodies are not meant solely for our own utility. In the Jesuit Constitutions, Ignatius often talked about caring for the body to serve the mission. He wrote, “proper concern for the preservation of one’s health and bodily strength for the divine service is praiseworthy and should be exercised by all.” [292] Viewed through our vow of obedience, Jesuits can take this to be an order from Saint Ignatius. During a time when religious life was rife with excessive bodily asceticism, practiced by Ignatius himself in his early post-conversion days, he cautioned against excessive abstinences. Instead, he commanded Jesuits to proceed with care such that “God may be more glorified through our souls and bodies.” [300] If he was willing to advise against excessive penances for the sake of the preservation of health, how much more must we avoid superfluous unhealthy eating? Ignatius returned to the topic at the end of the Constitutions, showing how much this topic mattered to him. “Attention should be devoted to the preservation of the health of individual members.” [826]
Care for our bodies then is a way of gratefully honoring a gift from God, enabling us to serve God’s greater glory. One of the best ways to faithfully steward one’s body is by reaping the benefits of a plant-based diet that are beneficial on individual and societal levels. For individuals, it is well known that animal-based foods are associated with many unhealthy outcomes such as diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers. While it is possible to eat unhealthy plant-based foods, it is much easier to have a clean diet if one eats plant-based foods. Except for sugar, plant-based foods are generally less calorie-dense than animal products. Consequently, doctors commonly recommend reducing the consumption of animal-based foods for better health outcomes concerning cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, and body weight.
Even athletes who need a high calorie and protein intake could follow the diet plans of famous plant-based sports personalities such as Novak Djokovic and Scott Jurek. The Game Changers, a documentary about plant-based athletes, can help overcome health related hesitations towards a plant-based diet. Those with moral convictions about shunning animal products but unwilling to go plant-based because of fear of ruining their health can be inspired by plant-based high-performance athletes. Those with an intellectual bent could look to Cory Booker, a vegan senator in his fifties, who gave a marathon 25-hour speech in the US Senate, further highlighting the sufficiency of a plant-based diet for physical and mental well-being.
On a societal level, animal agriculture is notoriously hazardous to human health. With the recent outcry over the high prices of eggs, did we wonder what caused the shortage? Widespread disease among the birds on factory farms decimated the populations of egg-laying chickens. In an essay in The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey noted, “The centralization and industrialization of the industry have intensified the bird-flu crisis. The largest commercial egg producers own millions of birds. A single laying-house holds as many as 350,000, serried into wire crates and stacked on top of one another. The virus spreads rapidly in such environments. USDA rules obligate farms to cull an entire flock if a single bird is infected; the government then compensates the farm for its losses.”
Most people do not care that millions of birds die in these horrendous conditions through disease or precautionary slaughter. But perhaps, they are more concerned when these diseases occasionally jump to humans with devastating consequences. Every recent pandemic has occurred because of close contact with animals we interact with for food. If we did not consume animal-based foods, the chances of another pandemic occurring are practically zero.
Factory farms are also driving the rise of superbugs or antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the overuse of antibiotics. Because animals are crammed together in high densities, disease spreads quickly among the unhealthy captive animals. As a result, factory farms continuously pump their animals with antibiotics in the hopes of keeping them alive long enough for economically profitable slaughter. In his book, Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer reports that every year 17.8 million pounds of antibiotics are fed to livestock, compared to only 3 million pounds consumed by humans. Because these are industry-reported numbers, some scientists calculate that the amount fed to animals may be closer to 25 million pounds.
Overusing antibiotics is akin to playing roulette more frequently. There is always a chance that bacteria will mutate and develop antibiotic resistance when we use antibiotics even in medical settings. But by overusing antibiotics, we are playing this dangerous roulette game more often, about eight times more often. That means, by the law of numbers, we get to the negative outcome of new superbugs a lot sooner. Every new superbug means we have fewer treatments for people with compromised immune systems.
Care for our health as individuals and as a society is not a selfish endeavor. It is how we honor God’s gift of our bodies and how we love our neighbor. Such a motivation behind abstaining from animal-based foods cannot be deemed self-centered, and ought to be embraced as a means of praising and serving God. To fulfill our duties of loving God, neighbor, and self, a plant-based diet seems to be a no-brainer.
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