Scientific Power of the Vegetarian Diet

Wait—there’s more. As if we need more to convince us that meat consumption is the ingestion of condensed negative energy! However, if we examine the poisons found in meat, we begin to glimpse the heartbreaking scope of the physical and environmental assault brought by meat production. The devastating repercussions to life on earth of these corporate agricultural practices cannot be overstated, and it helps us to grasp the sheer imperative of the solution.

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So here goes.

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Modern meat production makes only poisoned meat. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, close to one billion pounds of toxic pesticides are used in the United States every year—and keep in mind, this terrifying number is multiplied many times throughout the industrialized world. The number increases every year. In fact, any decrease seen in reported numbers is owed to the fact they are using more toxic and stronger pesticides; the pesticide residue found on land, water, and in meat continues to increase. The agricultural chemical industry produces about 45,000 different pesticides based on approximately 600 active ingredients.

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Factory farm animals have high concentrations of these chemicals from a lifetime of being sprayed. These living beings are continuously sprayed to control flies and other pests, which, as we all know, manifest around manure in incomprehensible and bewildering numbers. As is their feed—factory farm animals’ feed has been sprayed with dangerous chemicals an average eight times. Cows and their beef, and other factory-farmed animal meat have been found to carry sky-high levels of pesticide residues, which people ingest at the dinner table.

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This is only the beginning of the toxic stew that is meat (feel free to shudder). These agriculture corporations also pump animals full of hormones and growth stimulants to fatten them for slaughter. Read those words again. Fatten animals for slaughter. You are ingesting hormones that make animals fat.

Hormones are powerful biochemical agents. Hormones such as Steer-oid, Ralgro, Compudose, and Synovex are found (read inundate) on feedlots throughout the world. Ingested through meat and dairy consumption, these chemical compounds have a profound effect on human health even at the smallest doses. Scientists report that the hormone residues found in meat can disrupt people’s hormone balance, trigger developmental problems and a myriad of afflictions and diseases—including cancer —and interfere with reproductive systems.

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Hormone residues are thought to cause the early onset of puberty in girls; girls are reaching menses at younger and younger ages throughout the world. And, perhaps more alarming, scientists also suspect these chemical culprits are causing the precipitous decline in men’s sperm counts throughout the world. The Journal of Human Reproduction recently sounded the alarm based on a rigorous forty-year analysis: In North America, there is a whopping fifty-two percent drop in sperm concentration and a fifty-nine percent decline in total sperm count over a nearly forty-year period ending in 2011.

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Antibiotics are also poured into ALL livestock and even factory-farmed fish. There are two reasons used to rationalize (there’s that word again) an utterly insane practice. The first is the claim that antibiotics (somehow!) promote unnatural growth in animals. No scientist has yet to even develop a theory of how antibiotics manage this trick, probably because it is a myth and not true. Initiated decades ago, this malevolent practice of employing antibiotics for growth is based on the flimsiest of research—research, to no one’s surprise, that was sponsored by, you guessed it, companies selling the antibiotics. There are only about a dozen studies that show antibiotics promote growth in farm animals and these flawed studies used as subjects only five to twenty-five animals who lived in laboratories—and not factory farms. Scientists have tried to replicate this research, to no avail. They have repeatedly found no benefit of using antibiotics for growth, and certainly not enough to offset the enormous cost of these pesticides.

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 The second reason for the ubiquitous use of antibiotics in livestock concerns a desperate effort to compensate for the unsanitary conditions that define factory farm animals’ existence. These animals live out tortured lives on mountains of manure, waste teaming with bacteria, viruses, parasites, and toxins. Just the level of methane released into the air on a factory farm scorches lungs and causes respiratory ailments in the cows, pigs, and chickens. Workers on these farms must wear protective masks. The animals have no such protection. About eighty-five percent of pigs have respiratory infections at the time of slaughter. This is why it would be impossible to produce factory farm meat without the widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics. It simply cannot be done; the animals would die long before they reached the slaughter.

 

“Lobsters roasted alive, pigs whipped to death, fowls sewed up, are testimonies, to our outrageous luxury. Those who (as Seneca expresses it) divide their lives betwixt an anxious conscience and nauseated stomach, have a just reward of their gluttony in the diseases it brings with it.”

—Alexander Pope, poet and writer

 

To grasp the scope of the problem, look at the amounts: In the United States alone, humans use two million pounds of antibiotics annually to treat infections, while animals consume three million pounds. Another whopping 24.6 million pounds more of antibiotics are given to livestock in their feed.

We all know the result. Antibiotics are quickly losing their effectiveness for both people and animals worldwide; many illnesses no longer respond to antibiotics. Antibiotic-resistant forms of many diseases have already begun killing people; the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) estimated that two million people contract resistant infections annually and, of those, 90,000 die. It is only a matter of time before an antibiotic-resistant or even immune disease causes massive illnesses and fatalities; it is a ticking time bomb more deadly than Hiroshima. Unfortunately, to date medical research into the development of new and more effective antibiotics is not cost-effective, and pharmaceutical companies resist committing the necessary resources to it. It is a future calamity rushing at us.

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It might also be noted that in the U.S. Congress every year, someone (usually New York’s congresswoman, the admirable Louise Slaughter) introduces a bill to reduce the use of antibiotics used in livestock, but this emergency measure is stopped in its tracks by the massive force of the agricultural lobbying effort. It is not that they want to see people get sick and die or even that they are unaware of the global disaster headed our way because of this grotesque misuse of antibiotics. It is that they know the world’s meat supply must keep the great river of antibiotics flowing into the environment and animals’ bodies; they know modern meat production would come to a grinding halt without them.

It is a choice; it is just not the high choice.

 

“A dead cow or sheep lying in the pasture is recognized as carrion. The same sort of carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher’s stall passes as food. Careful microscopic examination may show little or no difference ... Both are swarming with colon germs and redolent with putrefaction.”

—Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

 

Finally, there is also the more common and pervasive food poisoning. Every person reading this has probably experienced bouts of food poisoning; it is the most common disease in the world. Many people confuse food poisoning with “stomach flu,” but diseases characterized by vomiting, diarrhea, and nausea, occasionally marked by a fever, are often food poisoning. The actual number of food poisoning afflictions in the United States alone is staggering: According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, food-borne pathogens cause seventy-six million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths each year.

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If we trace the etiology of food poisoning, again, it inevitably leads back to the unsanitary conditions found on the thousands of factory farms in agricultural areas. This is true even when the pathogen is carried from a vegetable source. The culprit is all that manure. Factory farms and their mountains of manure not only head right into our streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans but also into our water tables. It is also sprayed over our agricultural fields in excess.

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So, there it is, the pathogen shows up on your organic kale because that kale farm is near a factory farm and as we have seen, the likelihood that the pathogen is an antibiotic-resistant strain just keep increasing as time moves inexorably forward. Countless studies have documented that people working at CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) or living nearby are bombarded with health threatening, chronic problems: respiratory infections, digestive problems, high blood pressure rates, and higher rates of infant mortality, to name just a few. There is no escape, really. Food poisoning brought by meat production has touched all of us—the big meat eaters and the vegetarians alike.

 

“Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rate of coronary disease of any group in the country. They have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate.”

—William Castelli, M.D., Director, Framingham Heart Study,

 the longest-running epidemiological study in medical history.

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The Contrary Rationalizations:

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Despite the overwhelming evidence of the health benefits of a vegetarian diet, there are still doubters among us. All vegetarian advocates meet them. There are four popular rationalizations for meat-eating related to the health effects and mortality.

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First up, the broccoli lovers. These are people who imagine that killing a sentient being and harvesting broccoli share a moral equivalency, because idiotically, “broccoli wants to live, too.” If people are unable (read unwilling) to distinguish between a sentient cow and a broccoli plant, it is probably not worthwhile to pursue the conversation further.

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Just as perversely, people relish pointing out the legendary someone who ate steak every day and lived past the century mark. Ha! My own, ornery old grandma smoked cigarettes and ate giant portions of blood-red meat almost every day of her life. While crippled with back pain, arthritis and chronic fatigue, she kept on keeping on to her ninety-second birthday when she finally did manage to transition. We all know of these exceptions—but the emphasis here is on the word exception. The people who consume meat without experiencing ill-health effects are as rare as a nun in a bikini, a good hair day for President Trump (wait, too mean-spirited?) or say, ‘military intelligence.’ No matter. Health is hardly the only reason, spiritually or materially, to abstain from meat.

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Finally, there are those special folks who rationalize their meat consumption with “my body needs meat.” (Even some serious yogis!) The first part of their declaration begins, “I used to be a vegetarian, but….” To those of you with these special bodies I say not just “balderdash” but “Balderdash!” (with a capital letter and an exclamation point). Firstly, it is not about you and ‘your body’ for heaven’s sake—there are other beings involved—and this is the whole point, the main point. Please let that sink in. If this imagined ‘dilemma’ is probed further, we inevitably hear that the vegetarian diet made our special body feel ‘fatigued.’

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Not surprisingly, this is also the most common complaint among meat eaters. Unfortunately, many meat eaters do not realize that their meat consumption triggers fatigue. In other words, vegetarianism does not cause your fatigue. If in fact your fatigue is caused by dietary reasons, there are millions of healthy combinations of vegetarian foods and, combined with a little experimentation, they will bust that tired feeling to smithereens. I promise!

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All of these inane rationalizations are simply a means to escape the “high choice.” No way around it, meat consumption triggers health problems. Meat is full of unhealthy fats and too much protein, and is loaded with calories, pesticides, hormones, and other harmful chemicals. Meat is not just unnecessary, it is harmful. It weighs us down, physically and spiritually.

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In dramatic contrast, a plant-based diet is chock full of healthy fruits and vegetables, plenty of fiber, tons of nutrients, less saturated fats, and no trans fats or cholesterol. Additionally, vegetarian diets are comprised of a far greater variety of foods, which not only makes these diets more nutritious and healthful, but also more exciting and fun. And while it is true that our physical bodies are individualistic down to the iris in our eyes and the beating of our hearts, and that each person’s nutritional needs are different, the fact is—everyone obtains better health by going vegetarian. This is especially true in our modern world of health information, nutritional supplements, and vegetarian substitutes for any and all animal products.

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My main point—our physical bodies call us to a vegetarian diet.

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Our spirits soar when we answer.