Stamford Students Comprehension on Vegetarian Diet and the Reasons for Their Diet Transformation to a Vegetarian Diet

Stamford Students Comprehension on Vegetarian Diet and the Reasons for Their Diet Transformation to a Vegetarian Diet

Chanida Lukinovich

214310017

Stamford International University

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is to define the term “vegetarian diet” understood among students at Stamford International University, explore the reasons behind the transformation of regular diets to a vegetarian diet among students in Stamford International University and further evaluate and research on the common reasons for students’ diet transformation to vegetarian diet collected from the survey result. The result was that Stamford students’ understood the term vegetarian as “a meat-free diet” and the reasons for their choice of becoming a vegetarian were “to become healthier” and “to stop animal cruelty”.

Keywords: vegetarian, diet, no-meat, meat-free, healthy diet

Stamford Students Comprehension on Vegetarian Diet and the Reasons for Their Diet Transformation to a Vegetarian Diet

The understanding of a vegetarian diet varies among groups of students at Stamford University resulting in differentiation on the transformation reasons of their regular diets to a vegetarian diet. The survey result collected on this research paper suggests that a vegetarian diet is mostly understood as “a meat-free diet” among students at Stamford International University; however, a vegetarian diet in general is a diet that contains no animal proteins and it can be branched out into various different diets such as vegan, pescatarian and semi-vegetarian, which are somewhat differ in practice. Most common reasons applied to surveyed students’ diet transformation to a vegetarian diet is “to become healthier and “to stop animal cruelty”. Contradictory, most surveyed students do not believe that stopping meat consumption will help to improve our health. Therefore, this paper is written in order to further research on students’ understanding and reasoning on a vegetarian diet based on the survey results collected.

Literature Review

Vegetarian diet is a growing diet in our modern society. In 2008, approximately 3.2 percent of adults resided in the United States were Vegetarians and 10 percent of them were on vegetarian-inclined diet. (“Vegetarian In America,” n.d.) Recently, according to Watters (2015), “5% of the United States population is vegetarian and half of those people are vegan,” showing that the amount of Vegetarians and Vegans are gradually increasing. The rise in number of people who take on vegetarian diet leads to the curiosity of what contributes as a factor for vegetarian diet to become widely spread in the nation.

One of the factors assumed as a contributor to students’ diets transformation was commercial/factory farming method. Through our advanced media and social networking, students are now more likely to see and learn more about commercial/factory farming hence articles on Google, Youtube, Facebook and other social networking sites can be easily shared among people. So, commercial/factory farming can be assumed as a contributor of their diet transformation for its unpleasant videos and pictures of the way they treat their animals since 15 percent of the surveyed students choose “to help cease and spread awareness of factory farming” as their reason for becoming vegetarian and 23 percent chose “to stop animal cruelty” (check Figure 4). However, another significant factor is health improvement. 32 percent of students choose “to become healthier” by taking on a vegetarian diet (check Figure 4). This can be assumed that students in Stamford believe that vegetarian diet will benefit their health more than their regular diet. Nevertheless, 50 percent of the students don’t think that stopping meat consumption will help improve their health (check Figure 3). The contradictory in the survey result brings upon a question of “what is your understanding of a “vegetarian diet”?” Surprisingly, 15 percent of the students think that a vegetarian diet is a vegetable-based diet (check Figure 1). This could be the reason why students think that changing their diet to a vegetarian diet will help improve their health because at the young age most parents teach their kids to consume vegetables in order to be healthy. So, when people think of vegetables they can associate it with healthiness. Does a vegetarian diet actually benefit our body and help us to become healthier?