The effects of moving to a plant-based diet (vegetarian or vegan) are so wide ranging that it is the single most powerful consumer decision an individual may make. Becoming vegetarian or vegan profoundly impacts the environment, health and, of course, our animal friends. The single decision to eliminate animal products from your diet can add six healthful years to your life, cut precious freshwater consumption in half, reduce fossil fuel use by almost one third and annually spare the lives of 93 thinking feeling beings.

Happily, thanks to a growing range of vegetarian food in markets, veg-friendly restaurants and shelves full of inventive veggie cookbooks, turning away from meat and other animals products is easier than ever.

For our friends
When the modern movement for a vegetarian diet first began to gain momentum in the 1960’s and ‘70s, activists look at USDA figures and concluded each American is responsible for about 70 animals slaughtered each year. In the decades since, even while more and more folks become vegetarians, meat-eating Americans continue to "supersize" their animal consumption resulting in a current figure of 93 animals killed for each person in the US. Per capita meat consumption doubled during the first half of the twentieth century, doubled again in just thirty years up to 1980, and redoubled in the final twenty years the last century.

The drive to increase animal production to meet market demands has moved farmed animals into increasing large-scale, industrial production systems that deny their basic nature as living beings and force them into shockingly severe confinement. Pigs used for breeding future hams and bacon are stuffed into gestation crates barely larger than their own bodies. This system is so inherently cruel that the European Union and the State of Florida have banned it.

Hens used in egg production are confined to "battery cages" in which each bird has less living space than a common sheet of copy paper. She cannot fly or roost and if she ever sees the natural light of day it is likely to be on her one brief trip to the "processing plant" where her throat will be cut, without benefit of anesthesia, at something less than two years of age.

Dairy cows are one of the few farmed animals people still seen outdoors, but that limited liberty belies the lives of suffering they now lead. Through genetic manipulation, hormones and antibiotics each cow today produces several times more milk than her ancestors of just 50 years ago. Unnaturally massive udders, swelled with over-produced milk, hang near the ground and burden cows with painful hoof, hip and back ailments. So labored are their lives that a cow today is an exception if she remains in production beyond her fifth year. Aging cows are not put "out to pasture" as in our romantic notions of farming, but are instead sent to slaughter where their flesh, deemed less desirable than that of beef cattle breeds, becomes the cheaper meat in products such as hamburger.

The life you save may be your own

Vegetarians show lower rates many types of cancers including lung, colorectal and breast cancer. In 1990, Doctor Collin T. Campbell began publishing results of the largest scale study of dietetic impact on health ever conducted (which is still ongoing). Discovering a plant-based diet at the root of markedly lower occurrences of heart disease, cancer and diabetes among Chinese subjects of the study, Campbell concluded, "We’re basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant foods and minimizing our intake of animal foods."

While the dairy industry promotes its product as a source of calcium, it overlooks the fact that cultures that use no dairy products and far less meat than America enjoy far lower occurrences of osteoporosis. What they choose to overlook is that digesting animal fat (abundant in dairy and meat products) borrows calcium from our bones, ultimately weakening them. Vegans often take in less calcium than meat and dairy consumers, but need far less to maintain healthy bones.

Animal foods are not just potentially lethal as consumed over years; they can even kill outright. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 80 percent of reported cases of food poisoning are traced to meat. While the CDC doesn’t track this detail, it’s safe to assume that eggs and dairy, such as in summer picnic salads, account for much of the remaining 20 percent. A host of recent emerging diseases have originated in animal food production. Mad cow disease, avian flu, SARS, Ebola and even AIDS have their roots in using animals for foods.

Good planets are hard to come by
The growing per capital use of animal products, coupled with world-wide population growth, is quickly rushing the United States and indeed the whole world toward environmental degradation while shortages of farmable land, fresh water and eventually food itself begin to loom.

Breeding sows are typically confined in gestation crates so small that they can't even walk or turn around. Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary.

The toll of extreme confinement shows in the tormented expression and battered body of this pig. Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary.

Veal calves, a by-product of the dairy industry, are confined to tiny crates to keep their meat pale and soft. Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary.

Udder problems, resulting from excessive milk volumes and the constant cycle of breeding and milking, are routine in the dairy business. Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary.

The clogged artery of an atherosclerosis suffer shows the dangerous result of a high-cholesterol diet. Plant foods have no cholesterol.

Hog waste lagoons have often been link to ground water pollution including many incidents of well water contamination. Photo credit: E Magazine, 2002


A growing range of veggie alternative foods makes becoming vegetarian easier than ever before. Photo credit: Farm Sanctuary.

Going vegan saves valuable forest acreage both within the United States and abroad. About 87 percent of our agricultural land and 45 percent of the entire United States landmass are engaged in animal production. The American appetite for flesh requires a pound of the same from our impoverished neighbors who succumb to US market pressures to produce export crops even at the expense of their own cropland-poor populations. Throughout Central and South America, where farming families are desperate to hold a few sustaining acres, miles of countryside are engaged in beef production for US markets and grain production designed to more cheaply supply the vast and growing need for animal feed. US cropland used to contain 21 inches of topsoil, but overgrazing, overcropping, chemical-based agriculture and deforestation in some regions have depleted the depth of topsoil to less than six inches.

Petroleum use is a well-recognized environmental problem and some believe that our hunger for it is the motivation for recent wars. While the love of SUVs may be a worthy target of environmentalist’s scorn, significantly Americans consume nearly as much fossil fuels at the supermarket as at the gas pump. The typical American burns about 530 gallons of gas by driving and eating a meat-based diet gobbles up some 400 gallons of oil per person. Meanwhile, each vegan uses just 40 gallons of fuel through food consumption.

Living while letting live

Although the vegan life is easier than ever before, meat, dairy and eggs are so common that people find it daunting to even considering eliminating animal products.

Very rarely, a person who eats a typical American meat-based diet will, upon learning of how meat gets to the plate, convert immediately to a vegan diet. More typically, newly compassionate consumers gradually eliminate animal products over the span of months or years. An incremental approach to going vegetarian or vegan is fine. Each step along the way means more lives saved, more suffering prevented and more improvements to personal and global health. Take care not to substitute a deleted animal product with another animal product. Rather, trade beef and pork for grains, legumes, or meat substitutes and avoid adding more chickens in the place of cattle and pigs. Unfortunately, emphasis on eliminating red meat has had the unfortunate effect drastically increasing the number of chickens killed and created environmental problems in chicken-producing areas like the Delmarva peninsula that extends between the now-damaged Chesapeake and Delaware bays.

Says who
The facts included on this page have been researched and written in several authoritative vegetarian web sites and books. For simplicity’s sake, this page isn’t footnoted, but the resources listed below do go to the original government, medical, or academic sources.

Web sites

www.vegforlife.org
An extensive and well-researched site provided by Farm Sanctuary. A booklet based on the web site is also available.

www.farmsanctuary.org
Farm Sanctuary is a leading authority on factory farming and operates two exceptional farmed animal shelters.

www.pcrm.org
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine authoritatively addresses all aspects of human health concerns as they relate to animal food products and the use of animals as research subjects.

www.vegsource.org
Vegsource is a one-stop clearinghouse for a wide range of article and links on vegetarian issues. It is especially good for info on specific medical concerns and their links to dietetic causes.

www.veganoutreach.org
Vegan outreach publishes the "Why Vegan" pamphlet, one of the best and most widely distributed quick-convincers for a vegan diet.

www.vivavegie.org
The Viva Vegie Society publishes a very well researched resource, "101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian."

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