Why Go Veg?
Some of this is from a
Why Vegetarian presentation by Dilip Barman, President of the
Triangle Vegetarian Society.
Health:
- An effective way to reverse heart disease
- Eating meat impacts bone density
- Vegetarians have lower rates of hypertension
- Eating red meat or processed meat causes cancer
- People who follow a vegetarian diet are likely to have body weights as much as 20 percent less than non-vegetarians
- Dietary fiber comes from plants and can bind and escort out contaminants.
High-fiber diets are associated with decreased cancer, obesity, and coronary artery disease
- The commercial meat industry's practice of keeping cattle in feedlots and feeding them grain instead of grass is responsible for the heightened prevalence of E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria.
Grass-fed beef not only is lower in overall fat and in artery-clogging saturated fat, but it has the added advantage of providing more omega-3 fats.
- Roughly 55 countries have banned U.S. beef imports
- Animal products are potentially a lot more toxic than vegetable products. They contain parasites, salmonella, hormones, nitrates, and pesticides. Animals are being fed same-species meat, diseased animals, manure, plastics, drugs and chemicals, and unhealthy amounts of grains
- (Pro-vegan) Mad Cow Disease - prions have been found in milk!
- (Pro-vegan) More people are lactose Intolerant than realize: Up to 80 percent of African Americans, 80 to 100 percent of American Indians, and 90 to 100 percent of Asian Americans are lactose intolerant.
Environmental:
- Eating high on food chain wastes resources:
- Livestock consumes 47% of the soy and 60% of the corn produced in the U.S.
- The U.S. could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat because the 7 billion livestock animals in the United States consume five times as much grain as is consumed directly by the entire American population
- If humans switched from a meat-based diet to a plant-based one, the world's petroleum reserves would last 260 years, as opposed to 13
- Raising animals for food requires more than one-third of all raw materials and fossil fuels in the United States. If we all adopted a vegetable-based diet, only 2 percent of raw materials would be used
- The creation of a single hamburger patty (often containing the flesh of up to 100 different cows) uses enough fossil fuel to power a car 20 miles and enough water for 17 warm showers
- More than half of the U.S. water supply goes to livestock production
- If water used by the meat industry were not subsidized by taxpayers, common hamburger meat would cost $35 a pound. You need 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat — 2,500 gallons to generate a pound of meat.
Including the water required for forage and grain production, livestock's
water usage for every kilogram of beef produced is 100,000 liters of water,
versus 500 liters per kilogram for potatoes
- According to the journal Soil and Water, one acre of land could produce
50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or just 250
pounds of beef
- It takes 2,500 gallons of water, 12 pounds of grain, 35 pounds of topsoil
and the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline to produce one pound of feedlot beef
- Beef producers who supply American fast-food chains
are destroying rain forests at the rate of 260 acres a day to make room for grazing cattle.
- Global warming:
- Disappearing soil: About 90 percent of U.S. cropland is losing
soil — to wind and water erosion — at 13 times above the sustainable rate. Soil loss
is most severe in some of the richest farming areas; Iowa loses topsoil at 30 times the
rate of soil formation. Iowa has lost one-half its topsoil in only 150 years of farming —
soil that took thousands of years to form.
- Manure:
- Desertification of US West by grazing:
- Cattle graze 70% of west — but this generates only 2% of feed eaten by US cattle
- Cow consumes thousands of pounds biomass not returned to land
- Dung hardens in sun and persists months or years — and kills what it covers
Ethical:
- Minimize the impact on the earth — fair use of resources
- Animal suffering:
- World hunger:
