This picture of a lamb suddenly makes that roast dinner feel so wrong. But wooly coats and bleating babies aside, there are some other good reasons to opt for the nut roast next time you’re at the carvery.

In honour of World Vegetarian Day here are the nine best reasons to become a veggie.

1. Vegetarians are 32 per cent less likely to die or need hospital treatment as a result of heart disease.

3. The risk of antibiotic-resistant infections would plummet. Roughly 80 percent of all antibiotics, or 30m pounds of antibiotics, are fed to livestock annually and it can affect our health too.

4. Cheaper life insurance: AFI insurance agency has devised a Vegetarian Term Life policy to reward non meat-eaters with lower premiums as they tend to be healthier and less likely to die young.

5. Eating red and processed meat is thought to raise your risk of bowel cancer.

6. Because it could save the planet. Livestock emissions account for 14.5 per cent of all human-caused greenhouse gases, according to the UN.

7. Gases released by the fertilisers used for animal feed, as well as animal manure, contribute to the most potent of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

8. We’d have a lot more space. Grazing livestock take up 26 per cent of the world’s ice-free land surface.