The World Goes Vegan
Our vision that the world goes vegan is what Bill and I teach with gusto daily. If you think about all the food that is grown in the world, corn, soybeans and grains, just to feed animals, it is enormous. These crops are genetically engineered for animal feed and here is the problem. Firstly you have to irrigate these crops which takes up a huge amount of water, you have to use fertilisers so there is a lot of nitrogen going into the soil and lets not forget to mention the pesticides and herbicides that are used also. As the crops are irrigated, the nitrogen trickles off the fields into streams and ends up in the rivers and as this accumulates you end up with a huge overgrowth of algae growing because of all the fertiliser run off going into the water. The algae die off and end up destroying any life forms in the water and that is what is causing the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.
Making The Best Food Choices
THE FOOD CHOICES we make have an ENORMOUS IMPACT on the environment. This devastation to our water all started because of that ear of corn or soy that is grown to feed livestock. What's the answer? The answer is to eat the plants directly, grown organically for humans and not grown to feed animals that we then kill and eat. We would have a much cleaner planet and we could feed more people. Agriculture occupies forty percent of the earths land-mass, that's nearly half! Incredible, just incredible. We bulldoze down huge amounts of land to raise crops to grow feed for livestock, it's just outrageous. If people went vegan, the amount of land needed for agriculture would be just a fraction of that.
If you are not following a vegan diet, you are not an environmentalist. There is no two ways about it. You are either a vegan, or you are part of the problem. Aside from Bill's recent book Eating As If All Life Matters - one of the key books we ask all our students to read is Diet For A Small Planet by Frances Moore-Lappe. Frances wrote that book over 40 years ago and today, continues her wonderful educational work. At least thirty percent of all greenhouse gasses can be contributed to food production, and it also takes 1800 gallons of water to produce just 1lb of beef. Huge amounts of grains are also grown to feed chickens and again come with a load of pesticides and other toxic fertilisers.
The EAT Lancet commission came up with some interesting findings: Not only can you save the environment but you can save lives if people moved towards a plant based diet. This has been taught in Macrobiotics for the past five decades, however, science is catching up. Increasing plant consumption can eliminate 11 million premature deaths a year. A plant based-diet saves lives, will save the environment and eventually end the inhumane cruelty to animals. Where does climate change fit in with all of this? The impact that green house gases have on climate change are real, very real and reducing them would help stop climate change. As our friend and colleague Dr. Neal Barnard says If you took all the cows in NA and put all the cows in one side and all the people on the other side, each cow is as big as a sofa so the mass of cows is far bigger than the mass of people. Each cow is belching out methane. Belching comes from the cows mouth, they are ruminating. When you drink milk or eat beef, you are ingesting products that came from a methane producing factory.
Factory Farming Is Ruining The Earth & Its Inhabitants
There are factory farms all over the US producing methane. We all have the choice to shut down these methane factories that produce green house gas by choosing to adopt a vegan diet. While carbon dioxide is typically painted as the bad boy of greenhouse gases, methane is roughly 30 times more potent as a heat-trapping gas. Human-related Sources: In the United States, the largest methane emissions come from the decomposition of wastes in landfills, ruminant digestion and manure management associated with domestic livestock, natural gas and oil systems, and coal mining. To grow all those grains you need tractors that use fossil fuels that also contribute to the production of methane. Animal agriculture is a bigger contributor to green house gasses than cars, trains, planes and transportation in general. You don't need to wait for a factory to cap its smoke stacks you can control your contribution to climate change by going vegan.
Feed The World
There are nearly one billion people starving to death and one billion people eating themselves to death. Two-Thirds of maize, barley and soy and about one third of all grains are used to feed animals instead of feeding humans. Livestock are fed daily the grains that are used to fatten them up for very little return in terms of the meat produced. This is crazy. Think of the acreage and the amount of food that could be grown to feed humans, no one would be hungry. We can grow enough food to feed the world and as a huge bonus think about the reduction in health care costs, it would be simply mind-blowing. Our human ecology diet weaves all of this together. You get healthy, you save the animals, you assist with the reduction in green house gasses, you help others to have food, the benefits are bountiful to all we hold dear.
When clients come to us for health counselling, they have no interest in veganism. However, as their health is renewed, their heart opens along with their eyes. They become concerned about the cruelty to our animals, the devastation to our earth and many register to study with us to become health coaches. It's seriously a great joy to behold.
Eating a plant-based diet is simple and easy to do. You will find many educational videos like this one here on how to cook grains beans, vegetables dishes and desserts on our TV Channel. There are delicious recipes on our website and in our on-line store for free download and my new book Go Vegan stacked with education and 85 mouth-watering recipes is available for pre-order world-wide on amazon.
In good health
