Be(ach) Vegan!

It’s bikini season once again!

For many, ‘tis the season to trim down, and a trick that a lot of people seem to be adopting nowadays to do so is to cut down on their meat consumption. (To which I say, lettuce all eat little to no meat! For whatever reason!)

The more veganism and vegetarianism spread throughout the mainstream, the more myths about the lifestyle choice are dispelled—myths like the one that claims all vegans are skinny and weak.

Our friends at Ecorazzi recently featured 10 “Buff & Brawny Vegan Men,” including Mike Tyson (whaaa?) and Brendan Brazier, a former triathlete and author of the Thrive Diet. See the full list of guys.

Contrastingly, there are still a lot of caveman-like societal stereotypes also being out-ed by the media; just last month the Huffington Post ran an article featuring a study of men from the U.S. and Great Britain who rated men who ate meat as more masculine than their non-meat eating counterparts.

“To the strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American male, red meat is a strong, traditional, macho, bicep-flexing, All-American food,” the authors write in the study. “Soy is not. To eat it, they would have to give up a food they saw as strong and powerful like themselves for a food they saw as weak and wimpy.”

Indeed, meat consumption appears to still be on a rise, despite high profile vegans like Russell Simmons and any of the other million inspirations you can find to NOT be of the mindset that meat is manly.

Even beyond health reasons, changing your diet even slightly can have great positive effect on the weight of your ecological footprint. Where our food comes from and how it was grown translates into healthier choices for both us and the planet.

Reducing the amount of animal products and by-products you consume can have considerable impact on how hard a toll animal agriculture currently takes on the earth.

Animal agriculture is a major contributor to many of the world’s most serious environmental problems — global warming, water use and pollution, massive energy consumption, deforestation, loss of biodiversity and species, as well as the deep impact of fishing on our oceans.

A 2010 Report from the UN International Panel of Sustainable Resource Management “strongly urges a global shift to a plant-based diet to both feed a hungry world and greatly reduce environmental impacts like global warming.”