Vegetarian Speech
Submitted By marvparty1990
Words: 1358
Pages: 6
Smith 1
Jane Smith
Professor Alastra
SPC2608
November 28, 2012
Kiss Me, I’m a Vegetarian
General Purpose: To persuade
Specific Purpose: To persuade my audience to become vegetarians.
Central Idea: A vegetarian lifestyle will keep you healthier, keep our animals alive, and help ensure we don’t destroy our environment.
Introduction
I.
Attention grabbing material
A. Can you imagine…being forced fed to grow so fast that your legs cannot support the weight of your body? Or, being kept in a cage your entire life, and when you finally make it out, it’s only to be taken to a slaughterhouse? Or, living on dead carcasses and sleeping on feces?
B. What if I told you that on a daily basis, you are consuming food which could give you cancer, would you still eat it? Or that producing this food is devastating our environment and all it would take to change all of this would be to change your food intake?
II.
Orienting Material
Smith 2
A. According to www.animalconcerns.org, Americans consume 200 pounds of meat per person per year!
B. Credibility: Because I myself am a vegetarian, and have done extensive research on the topic, I am prepared to discuss the topic of vegetarianism.
C. Connect with Audience: I know many of you value eating healthy, and adopting a vegetarian lifestyle has numerous health benefits.
D. Central Idea/Preview: Today, I am going to persuade you all to become vegetarian because it is:
1.
Healthier than eating meat
2.
Better for our environment
3.
Better for our animals
(Transition: First, I would like to discuss how being a vegetarian is healthier for you.)
Body
I.
How is being vegetarian better for your health?
A. Eating meat is bad for your health for many reasons.
1. According to www.peta.org, the leaders in killing Americans include heart disease, cancer, obesity, and stroke. And, all of these are directly related to a meat based diet. Experts at the American Cancer Society stated that 80% of cancer can be preventable through a healthy diet with low fat and oil and high fiber such as a vegetarian diet!
Vegetarian foods contain less fat and are mostly fruits and vegetables.
Smith 3
2. Also, according to PETA, heart disease is the number one cause of death in America today and is often caused by a buildup of cholesterol and saturated fats from animal products in our arteries! Furthermore, when these animals are pumped up with antibiotics to live and hormones to grow, we consume this when we cook and eat the animals! 3. Vegetarians are also less likely to be as obese as meat eaters.
Americans keep getting fatter and meat is somewhat to blame.
According to PETA, the only weight loss plan that has been proven to take weight off and keep it off for more than a year is a vegetarian diet.
Animal products have much more fat than plant based products, and vegetarians typically weigh less than meat eaters!
(Transition: Now let’s look at how vegetarianism is better for our environment.)
II.
Being a vegetarian is better for our environment than being a meat eater.
A. Raising animals for food, damages our environment.
1. Raising animals for food, now uses 30% of the Earths land mass, according to www.peta.org. In the US alone, we have cleared more than 260 million acres of forest to create land to grow food to feed farmed animals. Forests are being bulldozed daily and this contributes to habitat extinction and species extinction.
2. PETA says that switching from a standard meat eating diet to a vegetarian diet would be way more effective in the fight against climate change than switching from a standard car to a hybrid.
Smith 4
According to vivavegie.org, a meat eater’s diet is responsible for more than seven times as much greenhouse gas emissions as a vegans diet is. Furthermore, if every American skipped one meal of meat per week, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million
