Become A Vegan

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true Become a vegan 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. A vegan is someone who doesn’t eat animal products: meat, fish, milk products, eggs, or honey. Many vegans also avoid fur, leather, and wool as these products generally result in the confinement, abuse, or slaughter of animals. 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.  While methane and nitrous oxide are relatively rare compared with carbon dioxide, they are — molecule for molecule — far more powerful greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide.  A single pound of methane, for example, has the same greenhouse effect as approximately 50 pounds of 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, dairy and eggs are 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.)  The American Journal of Clinical nutrition explains that inefficient fossil energy is expended in livestock production.  The average fossil energy input for all the animal protein production systems studied is 25 kcal fossil energy input per 1 kcal of protein produced.  This energy input is more than 11 times greater than that for grain protein production, which is about 2.2 kcal of fossil energy input per 1 kcal of plant protein produced.  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. 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 (or dairy).  So you have to grow all the crops required to raise the animals to eat the animals (and their milk/ eggs), 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.     The editors of World Watch concluded in the July/August 2004 edition that “the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future — deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities and the spread of disease.” Albert Einstein said that “nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.&rdquo Wolf

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Become A Vegan

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