Having spent nearly the last year of my life being vegetarian (and more recently, vegan), the only downside I’ve experienced has genuinely been the onslaught of questions I’ve received from people who don’t adhere to the same lifestyle as myself. While I usually don’t mind talking about veganism and am happy to help anyone who wants to become vegan, I’ve found that it’s draining to continually have to answer the same repetitive questions when someone is simply trying to combat the concept of being vegan.

The meat and dairy industry are entirely based upon profit and selling to ignorant consumers. When the general population is uneducated on what they’re eating and contributing to, there is insane profit to be found in selling meat and dairy. It's easy to understand where the ignorance comes from, but important to take the time to debunk it in order to educate others.

1. I eat humanely raised / grass-fed meat, so I’m not contributing to factory farming or hurting anyone at all.

As unfortunate as it is, eating humanely raised meat is truly not beneficial to any party involved. Aside from the obvious fact that animals are still being killed for your meal, grass-fed and humanely raised animals being farmed are just as bad for the environment as factory farming. While factory farming releases insane amounts of greenhouses gasses and produces very little in return, “humanely-raised” meat takes an awful lot of land in order to raise the animals, which contributes to environmental issues like deforestation.

The practice of mass farming (be it through factory farming or “humane” farming) to feed the general population is researched and known to be incredibly harmful. According to studies from Cornell University, the United States alone could feed 800 million people with the grain that is being fed directly to livestock only to produce a small amount of meat. With so many people on our planet dying of starvation or struggling to find food each night, contributing to an industry that does nothing to help those people doesn’t make sense.

2. I can’t be vegan because I’m deficient in iron. You can’t be vegan because protein is vital for growth. What about all of your nutrients?

Before I went vegan, I was fully convinced that the only way that one could possibly obtain iron in their diets was through eating meat, which obviously isn’t the case. There are high amounts of iron in foods like legumes, soybeans, chickpeas, spinach, quinoa and tomato paste. If you eat some of these with foods that contain Vitamin C, which will help you absorb the iron, then anyone can be absolutely set on a vegan diet. Cooking with iron pots is also incredibly helpful, as the acidity of foods can draw some of the iron out of the pot can increase the iron content of any food that you are making.

Plants have all eight essential amino acids and everything that you need aside from B12, which many argue that you can only get naturally through meat. However, B12 is a bacteria from the soil which is not naturally occurring in animals. Animals get B12 through an injection from farmers, which you then gain from eating meat -- which isn’t all that “natural” in the first place, and I can assure you that taking a little supplement once a day isn’t killing any vegans (or animals).

As far as protein goes, it is almost laughably easy for someone on a vegan diet to meet their protein needs. Nearly all vegetables, grains, legumes, potatoes and nuts you can think of contain some, if not a lot, of protein.

3. Eating dairy isn’t hurting any animals. Cows need to be milked to prevent infections.

As much as my macaroni and cheese loving self wishes that this common myth were actually true, it isn’t. Dairy farming is incredibly cruel -- like all mammals, cows can only produce milk when they are pregnant. No human is required to milk them, because the milk is for their calves so they can grow, and when the calves no longer need milk, they stop producing it. However, the cow’s babies are taken from them at birth and generally slaughtered for veal, and the vicious cycle repeats until a cow can no longer produce milk, and following this, they get slaughtered too.

Because waiting around for cows to reproduce naturally would cost precious time (and time is money), cows are artificially inseminated. In order for cows to be artificially inseminated, one must stick their hand up the cow’s rectum into their uterus in order to impregnate them. Sound gross? It is, and definitely unwelcomed on behalf of the cow. Your dollar is your vote.

4. Being vegan is incredibly restrictive, I could never do it.

Says the person who chooses from one type of milk and three or four meats every day. No, but really, I just had some garden grown orange chicken today. Panda Express was my go to restaurant just under a year ago, but I'm happy and content with my Gardein mandarin orange nuggets. There’s a vegan alternative for absolutely everything you can possibly think of. Worried you would miss steak? No worries, several brands have got you covered with a scarily close resemblance to the real deal. All of the same food that I ate prior to being vegan, but without all of the scary health concerns, environmental destruction and loss of life.

5. If we weren’t eating meat, then all of the farm animals would overpopulate. Not eating meat would throw off the food chain. It’s the circle of life.

Animals are specifically bred for the purpose of factory farming. They’re not going out into the wild to look for cows to create food, they’re breeding them for the sole purpose of profit. If less people were eating meat, then there wouldn’t be nearly as many cows being bred.

When an animal kills a human for food, we hunt it down and kill it because it is a threat to human life. Isn’t that simply part of the circle of life, though? The concepts of the food chain and the circle of life are only convenient when it comes to humans using it to exert force over other species, but never when it returns to us.

Whether you’re vegan, vegetarian or neither of those, it’s always important to reflect on what you are doing and in what ways you are contributing to this Earth, especially if you care about the well-being of our planet and the future generations that will exist long after ourselves. Resources can be found all over the internet about going vegan and the ways in which veganism can help you, as well as the rest of this planet.