Don't Eat Meat (Become A Vegetarian)

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false Become a vegetarian and save more than 3,530 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions from being released into the atmosphere, as well as over 242,500 gallons of water. Environmental: A 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock production accounts for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions — more than all forms of transportation combined. Meat’s supersize impact comes from fuel- and fertilizer-intensive agricultural methods of growing feed, all the power needed to run slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants and the potent greenhouse gases produced by decomposing manure. Pork, lamb and poultry all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate. Sixty percent of the deforestation in the Amazon River basin between 2000 and 2005 can be attributed to cattle ranching; much of the remainder was cleared to raise corn and soy for feed. And cows, once fed, burp — a lot. Each day, a single cow can burp as much as 130 gallons of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more than 20 times more heat per ton than carbon dioxide. The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams.   Efficiency: Meat is not an efficient food source, bottom line. A single kilogram (2.2 lbs) of beef is responsible for the equivalent release of 80 lbs. of C02 and the use 5,500 gallons of water. The average American eats 318 pounds of meat every year (beef = 97 lbs, pork = 68 lbs, poultry = 106 lbs, fish = 45 lbs., other = 2 lbs.) For every 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of high-quality animal protein produced, livestock are fed about 6 kg (13.2 lbs) of plant protein. According to a January New York Times article, Americans eat about 110 grams of protein a day, which is roughly twice the federal government’s recommended allowance (56 grams from a mixed diet). Of those 110 grams, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine eating around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources. Alternet.org gives a simple explanation for the lack of efficiency in a meat-based diet: "...It requires exponentially more resources to eat chickens, pigs, and other animals, because most of what we feed to them is required to keep them alive, and much of the rest is turned into bones and other bits we don't eat; only a fraction of those crops is turned into meat. So you have to grow all the crops required to raise the animals to eat the animals, which is vastly wasteful relative to eating the crops directly. According to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the US livestock population consumes more than 7 times as much grain as is consumed by the entire American population. There are approximately 800 million people in the world suffering from hunger and/ or malnutrition and 1/3 of the corn and soy grown in the world feeds cows, pigs and chickens. In America alone the amount of grains fed to US livestock is sufficient to feed about 840 million people who follow a plant-based diet (more than the entire starving population of the world).   Health: Straight to the point: eating meat takes a huge toll on your health. An article published in "Preventive Medicine," a peer-reviewed journal of the American Health Foundation, estimated the health costs of the nation's current omnivorous diet at $28.6 billion to $61.4 billion a year. The doctors who wrote this article linked regular consumption of red meat and poultry to significant increases in the risks of developing high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, gallbladder disease, overweight and resulting osteoarthritis, food poisoning and cancers of the colon, lung, ovary and prostate. More evidence? The August 15, 2007 Morning Edition of NPR re ported that there's significant evidence that diets high in red meat and fatty foods increase the risk of colon cancer. The Journal of the American Medical Association (January 12, 2005) reports the findings of a 20-year study from the American Cancer Society, which confirms that those who eat the most meat get the most cancer. Specifically, those who eat the most red meat -- beef and/or pork and/or processed meat products -- get colon cancer 30% to 40% more often than those who eat these foods only once in a while. Cutting meat out of your diet reduces risk of heart disease (#1 cause of death in US) by more than 50 percent.     Wolf

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Don't Eat Meat (Become A Vegetarian)

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