Convincing people to go vegan

How can you convince someone to go vegan? As I'm a passionate vegan myself and am interested in encouraging more people to reconsider the choice of eating meat, I wanted to publish a piece for vegans to help them at least make their friends and family consider veganism. But I was struggling to find ideas. So the thought occurred to me, why not turn to the vegan community to help answer the question? So I put out this request:

Working on a casual piece about turning to vegan and would like to hear from vegans who were able to convince former meat-eaters to turn vegan, or at least cut back on meat consumption. Personal stories welcome.

I was overwhelmed by the responses, with some fantastic ideas being shared. I published all the comments this received here:

https://outwittrade.com/how-to-convince-people-to-go-vegan/

What did people submit? Well, there were a number of very nice responses. Many people also wrote about their personal stories turning vegan. Having read through all the responses, I can make some summaries of them as follows:

• Lead by example: As the saying goes, if you want to change the world, get your own house in order first. You should be a vegan yourself, and hold yourself accountable to it, before going out and trying to convince others to turn to veganism. Also, by being vegan yourself you'll have a much better idea of what veganism is and what the experience is like.
• Environmental reasons: There have been many studies showing that one can have a huge impact on their environmental footprint by turning to veganism. Factory farming has a major impact on the environment.
• Health: There is a ton of argument when it comes to whether a vegan diet is healthy or not. However, as I see it, the evidence is definitely there that a plant-based diet is perfectly healthy and one does not need to eat meat to be healthy.
• Ethical reasons: For me, this is probably the biggest reason I turned to veganism. Factory farming is simply an awful practice and it's hard to willingly eat meat once you know what goes on in factory farms. I recommend watching the documentary 'Earthlings' which is probably the most well known documentary in this area.
• Delicious vegan foods: One of the main reservations people have about veganism is that it would be dull to just eat vegetables all the time. If that's you, I definitely recommend looking up some delicious vegan recipes online. You do not necessarily need meat to make a tasty dish! And once you turn to veganism, if you're into cooking, you may find it a joyful experience trying to cook all kinds of new vegan dishes.

But the bottom line in many of the responses, which I 100% respect, is that people should not be FORCED to turn vegan, and insulting people is certainly not an effective way to do things. Rather, it's much better to just gently explain the benefits of veganism. If you're a vegan yourself and having trouble explaining yourself to others, I definitely recommend checking this post out. I certainly really enjoyed reading the submissions people sent myself.

And by the way, if you have any input to share on this topic, you're welcome to submit a comment and we'll add it to the article. Have a read through the responses we've received so far, and consider if there's anything that springs to mind that no-one has covered yet. We hope to make this a very comprehensive resource for the benefits of veganism, so any new input would be very much appreciated.