The meat industry breeds and kills animals because the consumers buy and eat meat. By boycotting meat and other products with animal content not nearly as many animals will need to be killed and tortured by the meat industry. Except from this argument there are another two major reasons to choose a vegetarian diet:

* For the Environment. It is an enormous waste of the earth's resources to grow crops that are to be fed to livestock instead of being used for humans directly. In Sweden a full 2/3 of all crops grown is used to feed livestock alone. Through the process of feeding the crop to livestock instead of letting the crop feed humans right away, a much larger quantity of water, energy and land is needed, compared to the vegetarian lifestyle. As a comparison it takes 5 times more water to produce 1 kilo of meat compared to 1 kilo of a vegetarian food. In making a meal with a bean base only 17-30% of the energy it takes to make a similar porkbased meal i  used. Compared to meat production the beans use a 5-12 times SMALLER area to produce the same amount of protein. If everyone had a vegetarian diet this land could be used for forestry for example, we could save the earth's forests, or we could use this land to produce bioenergy.