Can a vegetarian diet improve or restore health? Can it prevent
certain diseases? Advocates of vegetarianism have said yes for
many years, although they didn’t have much support from modern
science until recently. Now, medical researchers have discovered
evidence of a link between meat-eating and such killers as heart
disease and cancer, so they’re giving vegetarianism another
Since the 1960s, scientists have suspected that a meat-based
diet is somehow related to the development of arteriosclerosis
and heart disease. As early as 1961, the Journal of the American
Medical Association said: Ninety to ninety-seven percent of
heart disease can be prevented by a vegetarian diet. Since that
time, several well-organized studies have scientifically shown
that after tobacco and alcohol, the consumption of meat is the
greatest single cause of mortality in Western Europe, the United
States, Australia, and other affluent areas of the world. The
human body is unable to deal with excessive amounts of animal
fat and choleste