Albert Einstein once said, "Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

Although Einstein uttered the statement more than half a century ago, the truth of his words is evident now more than ever. A close look at the facts shows that the world's biggest problems — disease, hunger, and environmental destruction — are closely linked to the practice of raising animals for food. With obesity rates at an all-time high and our natural resources dwindling away, the arguments for plant-based eating are hard to ignore.

The section that follows outlines some of the arguments for kicking the meat habit. For information about transitioning to plant-based eating, go to Free VegKit for the Hows.

Diet and Disease

According to the American Dietetic Association, "Appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”

In the United States alone, 1.3 million people are killed each year by heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases, all of which have been strongly linked to diets high in animal products. In this section, we'll examine the role that plant-based eating can play in preventing vascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, infectious diseases, and other chronic conditions.

Vascular Diseases

Vascular diseases, including heart diseases and stroke, are caused by blockage of the arteries that supply oxygenated blood to the body's vital organs. The blockages are caused by a build-up of fatty plaque along the artery walls. This condition is called atherosclerosis. Total blockage of an artery leading to a portion of the heart or the brain brings on a heart attack or stroke. Nearly 860,000 Americans die each year of vascular diseases.

Many studies have shown that vegetarians seem to have a lower risk of obesity, coronary heart disease (which causes heart attack), high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus and some forms of cancer.
- American Heart Association

Diets laden with saturated fat, cholesterol, and salt are the key factors in the incidence of cardiovascular diseases. Cholesterol is the key component of the fatty plaques. Saturated fats raise blood cholesterol level more than any other factor. Salt consumption promotes water retention and blood volume, leading to hypertension, which contributes to the incidence of heart disease and stroke, as well as to rupture of blood vessels.

Transitioning to a plant-based diet is a great way to reduce your risk of vascular disease. While all animal foods contain cholesterol, plant foods are cholesterol-free. In fact, the antioxidants and folic acid in plant foods protect arteries from plaque formation. Plant foods are also naturally low in saturated fats and salt, and the potassium in plant foods reduces hypertension.

Cancer

The term "cancer" refers to a variety of diseases that occur when cells grow out of control, spread through the body, and interfere with the function of a vital organ. Cancers of the lung, breast, prostate, and the digestive tract have all been linked with diets high in animal foods. Nearly 260,000 Americans die of these types of cancer each year.

Animal products provide carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) many inroads to your body:

• Consumption of animal fats raises blood testosterone and estrogen levels, promoting prostate and breast cancers, respectively.
• Carcinogenic pesticides spread on animal feedcrops accumulate in animals' fatty tissues. When eaten, these animal fats interact with bile acids in the digestive tract to release carcinogens.
• Animal fats heated to high temperatures, as in deep-fried foods, also form carcinogens. The National Toxicology Program, a government interagency program, lists four distinct heterocyclic amines "formed during the cooking of meat" as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen."
• Nitrites in hot dogs and other 'cured' meat products are known carcinogens.
• The Insulin Growth Factor (IGF) in dairy products promotes malignant cell growth.

Conversely, increasing your intake of plant foods can reduce your cancer risk. Plant foods contain fiber, which helps prevent cancer of the digestive tract by speeding food transit before release of the carcinogens and reduces the risk of breast cancer, perhaps by lowering estrogen level. Plants also contain antioxidants and flavones that impede formation of cancer cells.

Diabetes

The cells of our body feed on glucose, with help from a hormone called insulin. Certain animal proteins in the bloodstream can block insulin from playing its vital role, leading to Type II diabetes. Diabetes is a serious disease which causes shortness of breath, vomiting, dehydration, and eventually contributes to heart and kidney diseases. Diabetes kills nearly 70,000 Americans each year.

Poor eating habits have caused a rise in the incidence of this disease among children. For some, cow's milk generates antibodies that destroy the pancreatic cells that produce insulin, leading to Type I diabetes.

Infectious Diseases

Pathogens that thrive in animal foods are the primary causes of infectious diseases. Lumped under the innocuous label "food poisoning," Escherichia coli, Salmonella enteritidis, Campylobacter jejuni, and Listeria monocytogenes cause an estimated 9 million cases of stomach cramps, vomiting, and general misery each year, according to The Centers for Disease Control. These diseases are occasionally fatal.

All meat and poultry products are required to carry warning labels because the USDA has been unable to vouch for their safety. In many cases, the pathogens, including Salmonella and Campylobacter, are introduced to the human food supply by eviscerating equipment that spills fecal matter into the cavities of the birds' bodies.

In 2002, following repeated incidents of school food poisoning, the Department decided to irradiate meat destined for the school lunch program. Meat products also contain antibiotic residues, which build up resistance in pathogens, and render antibiotics less effective in treating infectious diseases.

Chronic Conditions

Kidney stones and other kidney diseases are typically associated with excessive consumption of meat, dairy, and other proteins which these organs convert into fat and waste products. Kidney stones can cause severe pain, urinary obstruction, and kidney damage. Kidney diseases kill nearly 40,000 Americans each year.

Lactose tolerance: Dairy products are responsible for a number of serious digestive and allergic reactions. Nearly 50 million Americans, including 75% of African Americans and 90% of Asian Americans suffer from severe cramps caused by lactose intolerance. Common allergic reactions include asthma, skin rashes, and ear infections.

Obesity is reaching new heights in the United States. Since the early 1960s, the obesity rate has more than doubled for both men and women. According to the American Heart Association, for the years between 1999 and 2002, 27.6% of men aged 20-74 fit the clinical definition of obesity. For women in the same age range, the prevalence was 33.2%.

Obesity, defined as a body mass index of 30.0 and higher, is a risk factor for a number of other ailments, including vascular disease. Each year, 300,000 Americans die from conditions caused or worsened by obesity.

The good news is that, according to a American Academy of Family Physicians Report (November 2000), genetics contributes to only about 40% of obesity variance. This means that, through diet and exercise, you have the power to control your weight and preserve your health.

Diet and World Hunger

Worldwide, nearly a billion people suffer from chronic hunger. Twenty-four thousand people per day or 8.8 million per year die from hunger or related causes. Three-fourths are children under the age of five. Chronic hunger causes stunted growth, poor vision, listlessness, and susceptibility to disease.

Global malnutrition is largely the consequence of inequitable distribution and waste of food resources. Only 10% of hunger deaths are attributed to catastrophic events like famine or war. Hunger is a complex problem, but non-sustainable practices related to animal agriculture exacerbate the problem, depleting cultivable land, topsoil, water, energy, and minerals.

Additionally, converting plant-based foods into animal-based foods is an extremely inefficient process. For instance, it takes 12 pounds of wheat to produce just one hamburger. Twelve loaves of bread could be produced from the same amount of wheat.

Role of Animal Agriculture

A meat-based diet requires 10-20 times as much land as a plant-based diet. Nearly half of the world's grains and soybeans are fed to animals, resulting in a tremendous waste of food calories. The extent of waste is such that even a 10% drop in US meat consumption would free up enough grains to feed the world's starving millions.

Visit Well-Fed World for more information on global hunger and meat.

Future Outlook

Diet and the Environment

Animal agriculture is more devastating to our natural environment than all other human activities combined. This devastation impacts land, water, air, and wildlife.

Land

Animal agriculture has been turning lush forests and prairies into barren deserts since the dawn of human history. The process begins with clear-cutting of forests to create pastures for cattle and other ruminants. This is a major loss, because trees provide wildlife habitats, keep topsoil in place, replenish groundwater aquifers, absorb carbon dioxide, and stabilize climate.

As the pastures become overgrazed, they are plowed under and turned into animal feed croplands. With little or no plant growth to hold it in place, topsoil is carried by rain and melting snow into streams and lakes, and its productive capacity is lost forever. This process is accelerated by the use of marginal sloping lands to meet the insatiable demand for animal feed.

Water

Animal agriculture's insatiable demand for land presses into service arid lands that require irrigation. Irrigation now accounts for more than 80% of all water available for use in the US and leads to critical water shortages, particularly in the Western states. The rain and melting snow that run off animal feed croplands and factory farms dump more pollution into our lakes, streams, and estuaries than all other human activities combined.

The cropland runoff contains soil particles, salts, organic debris, fertilizer, and pesticides. Soil particles smother fish eggs and bottom dwelling organisms and block stream flow. Salts, primarily sodium and potassium chloride, raise the salinity of the water, rendering it unsuitable for certain organisms. Organic debris feeds microorganisms that deplete the water's oxygen supply and kill the fish. Fertilizers spur algal blooms that smother or actually attack aquatic organisms. Pesticides kill all living organisms.

Animals raised for food in the US produce 130 times the amount of waste that people do. This waste, containing pathogens and hormones, is stored in huge open cesspools, euphemistically called "lagoons." Eventually, this waste winds up in the nearest waterway, killing aquatic organisms directly or through formation of algal blooms. Waste from mid-Atlantic pig and poultry factory farms has destroyed fisheries along the Eastern seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the waste leaks into the ground, poisoning vital groundwater supplies.

The dangers posed by these practices have manifested in the Gulf of Mexico in an area known as the Dead Zone. The Sierra Club, an environmental protection organization, describes the extent to which animal agriculture destroys aquatic habitats:

Every summer in the Gulf of Mexico an area, sometimes as large as Massachusetts, becomes void of life due to severely depleted levels of oxygen in the Gulf's water, a state known as hypoxia. This condition kills every oxygen-dependent sea creature within its 8,500 square mile zone. The Dead Zone varies in size, but it has been growing steadily since 1993.
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A major, rapidly growing, source of sewage in America's waterways comes from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). These corporate hog, chicken and cattle farms concentrate massive amounts of manure in small areas, often leading to egregious manure spills into rivers and streams or soils over-saturated with manure.... [O]ver-saturated soils are not capable of absorbing the manure and, after a rain or irrigation, it runs off the land into rivers and streams.

Air

Wind erosion from animal croplands is the largest source of airborne particles, which irritate respiratory passages and make them more susceptible to respiratory infections. Factory farms produce a stench that poses a major nuisance (and possibly hazard) to neighbors for miles around. Methane emitted by cattle and carbon dioxide generated by the power plants that operate factory farms are major contributors to global warming.

Oceans

Commercial fishing, aquaculture, and angling are environmentally catastrophic. Commercial fishing is wiping out biodiversity, as miles of nets sweep up all the fish in their path—and take coral habitats with them. Commercial fishers have devastated the ocean’s ecosystem to the extent that large fish populations are only 10 percent of what they were in the 1950s.   

Commercial fishing boats leave their ports in pursuit of specific species of fish, but their hooks and nets bring up thousands of pounds of other marine animals as well. Sharks, sea turtles, birds, seals, whales, and other nontarget fish who get tangled in nets and hooked by long-lines are termed “bycatch” and are thrown overboard. They fall victim to swarming birds or slowly bleed to death in the water. Scientists recently found that nearly 1,000 marine mammals—dolphins, whales, and porpoises—die each day after they are caught in fishing nets. By some estimates, shrimp trawlers discard as much as 85 percent of their catch, making shrimp arguably the most environmentally destructive fish flesh a person can consume.

Diet and the Animals

Each year, ten billion cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, and other innocent, sentient animals are caged, crowded, deprived, drugged, mutilated, and manhandled in US factory farms. They are then hauled to the slaughterhouse and slaughtered under atrocious conditions. Nine percent (over 850 million) never make it to the slaughterhouse, dying from stress-induced diseases or injuries.

Additionally, it is estimated that more than 17 billion fish are killed for food in the United States each year.

The section that follows will describe the living conditions of cows and calves, pigs, and chickens and turkeys, as well as the effect of animal agriculture on wildlife and transport and slaughter.

Cows and Calves

Beef cattle are typically enclosed in feedlots, which pack tens of thousands of animals per unit. Cows have no protection from rain or snow, freezing wind, or searing heat. They are castrated, dehorned, and branded with no painkillers.

Many dairy cows are now raised in large, mechanized dairies or "dry-lot" dairies, where they have little or no access to pasture. In one type of system, cows are confined to cramped stalls and are usually chained by the neck; in another type of operation, they are crowded into outdoor enclosures where they must continuously stand and lie on feces and urine-caked soil. Dairy cows are artificially inseminated and kept perpetually pregnant in order to ensure a constant supply of milk. Many cows are injected with bovine growth hormone to boost milk production to unnaturally high levels, causing infectious udder diseases and additional stress to the animals.

When the cows' babies are born, they are removed from their mothers almost immediately so humans can drink the milk nature intended for calves. Most of the male calves are auctioned off for beef and slaughtered when they are only one and half years old; others are sold to veal producers, where they are kept chained by the neck in tiny, filthy wood crates to keep their flesh soft and fed a liquid diet to keep their flesh pale. These conditions breed diarrhea, respiratory disease, and anemia. The calves are deprived of natural food, fresh air, and their mothers’ love. After 16 weeks, they are dragged to slaughter and served as veal. Some of the calves who aren't raised for beef or traditional veal are killed days after they are born and used in TV dinners and for inexpensive veal products. The premature separation of the cow from her babies causes suffering for both mother and offspring. Many cows search and bellow for their calves for days after they’re removed.

Female calves are also denied their mothers' affection. Because a dairy cow's milk is produced to be sold for human consumption, every drop suckled by her calves represents lost profits to factory farm corporations. For this reason, female calves, too, are separated from their mothers at an early age. Instead of being weaned on their their mothers' milk, they may be weaned on a "milk replacer" comprised of beef fat or cattle blood, putting them at risk for Mad Cow disease. Once the females reach maturity, they will be impregnated and replace their mothers on the milk line.

Pigs

Breeding sows suffer a similar fate. They are continually impregnated in tiny metal gestation crates until they are ready to give birth. Confinement in these crates, about two feet wide, leads to obesity and crippling leg disorders. Boredom and social isolation cause the pigs, unable even to turn around, to engage in stereotypic behaviors such as bar-biting and head-waving. Breeding sows spend approximately 80% of their lives in gestation crates. The crates serve no purpose other than to confine the pigs to allow factory farm corporations to crowd more pigs into less space.

Fish slaughter plants in the U.S. make no effort to stun fish, who are fully conscious when they start down the slaughter line. Their gills are cut, and they are left to bleed to death, convulsing in pain. Large fish, such as salmon, are sometimes bashed on the head with a wooden bat called a “priest,” and many are seriously injured but still alive and suffering when they are cut open. Smaller fish, like trout, are often killed by simply draining water away and leaving them to slowly suffocate or by packing them in ice while they are still fully conscious. Because fish are cold-blooded, allowing them to suffocate on ice prolongs their suffering, leaving them to experience excruciating pain for as long as 15 minutes before they die.

Most consumers are unaware of the power of their daily purchasing decisions in preventing — or subsidizing — cruelty on the farm. Every time we sit down to eat, we have a choice: we can choose to turn a blind eye towards the suffering that is an inescapable part of meat, milk, and eggs; or we can boycott an industry that inflicts wanton cruelty upon sensitive individuals and whose bottom line depends upon billions of deaths.