The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet (6 page)

Here’s the deal:

Meat contributes to global warming and climate change:
One of our biggest environmental concerns is controlling the emission of gases into the atmosphere that get trapped and cause the greenhouse effect. You know how in a greenhouse the glass ceilings allow the sun’s warmth to enter while trapping all the heat inside? Well, by burning fossil fuels and creating gas emissions at an unprecedented rate, we are raising global temperatures and changing climate patterns worldwide. The consequences are pretty huge, including coastal flooding, drought, and severe weather events. Even the polar ice caps are melting, and they play a critical role in keeping the planet cool by reflecting sunlight. When they’re gone and the sun’s heat is absorbed by the dark blue water that remains, we’re in for even hotter times and massive catastrophes.

Pills versus Plants

Did you know that drug companies spend $19 billion annually to cultivate their relationships with physicians?
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That’s $52 million a day for free gifts, free drugs, and education about the drug companies’ products. Obviously, the situation creates a conflict of interest for doctors, and it has been documented that all these freebies do influence physicians’ prescribing habits.
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Unfortunately, your doctor is not tossing and turning at night, debating the benefits of pushing drugs or food. He doesn’t have enough information to be conflicted; although medical schools are supposed to provide students with approximately 25 hours of nutritional education, it’s believed that as many as 60 percent don’t comply.
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Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry is pumping money into medical schools in the form of research grants for drug studies. And we’re not talking chump change here: Over the next 3 years, Vanderbilt University will receive $10 million from pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson to develop new drugs, with another $100 million promised if certain research milestones are met.
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That kind of influence might eclipse a few hours of nutrition classes! So keep in mind that after reading this book, you may know more about healthy eating than your doctor does.

Medical school faculty are also on the payroll. About 1,600 of Harvard University’s 8,900 professors and lecturers disclosed that they had a financial interest in businesses related to their teaching, research, or clinical care. One hundred forty-nine had financial ties to Pfizer and 130 to Merck. It’s becoming hard to tell if a professor is teaching about certain drugs because they work or because the company that makes them is sending him on a golf vacation. Members of the American Medical Student Association are so disturbed by teachers taking payola from drug companies that they recently began grading medical schools’ ability to monitor and control drug industry money. While the University of Pennsylvania received an A, Yale got a C, and Harvard a big fat F.
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I’m not saying that doctors are bad people or that
all
the information they’ve received is wrong. I’m just here to remind you that the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable in the entire country and that Americans buy nearly half the drugs on the planet—spending $235 billion in 2008.
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And when companies are chasing that kind of money, profit often trumps the truth. None of us like to think that we can’t trust the institutions we’ve grown up with, but being a truly healthy person means exploring important issues deeply and thinking for yourself. As your body gets stronger and stronger from eating whole grains and vegetables, your intuition will get louder and louder. Remember: You were designed by nature, not by a corporation or a doctor. Thank goodness Mother Nature—being so rich herself—isn’t trying to make a buck off you.

Of the gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is the one we often hear about. It comes out of our cars, our heaters, and our lungs. But there is another gas, methane, that traps 21 times
²⁴
more heat per molecule than carbon dioxide. Methane is a naturally occurring trace gas and a normal part of our atmosphere. One of its biggest sources is . . . burps. Yup. That’s right. And as much as you might think your brother belches, cows standing around being overfed and never exercised—1.3 billion of them worldwide—burp much, much more. In fact, each cow produces anywhere from 100 to 520 quarts of methane gas
daily.
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Not that methane is inherently bad; it exists naturally and in a balanced ratio with other gases within the atmosphere. But with all the animals we’ve bred for food, we’ve tipped the scales. Methane emitted by livestock accounts for 19 percent
²⁶
of the total global methane emissions. In fact, the livestock we keep—to feed us meat that hurts our bodies—produce more methane than landfills, waste treatment plants, and even the methane we use as natural gas to heat our homes!

By deciding not to eat that burger, you’ll be reducing the numbers of cows cattlemen need to raise, thereby reducing the gases they emit. It’s a straight line from a plant-based diet to a healthier planet. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recently said, “In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, [reducing meat consumption] clearly is the most attractive opportunity.” His specific recommendation? “Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there.”
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If everyone in America were to adopt a plant-based diet, we would reduce U.S. greenhouse gas production by 6 percent virtually overnight. Six percent may not sound like a lot, but when you remember that the United States creates 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, it’s a significant slice of the pie. And don’t forget that we’d be reducing heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and arthritis at the same time. That, in turn, reduces hospital visits, insurance nightmares, and dependency on pharmaceuticals. The price for all this? Well, I hate to break it to you, but here goes: You must eat really yummy food and feel young, vibrant, and happy for the rest of your life.

Superhero: Queenie the Cow

Queenie the cow escaped from a meat market in New York City. She ran from workers and evaded the NYPD for several blocks of lower Manhattan. When she was caught and threatened with a return to the slaughterhouse, hundreds of New Yorkers spoke up for her, and she was taken to a farm sanctuary where she thrives today. GO, QUEENIE!

Factory farming creates toxic sludge:
The meat industry has a nasty reputation for not containing its waste very well. Not only does the poo, fertilizers, and other sludge get into the soil, it can also leach into nearby rivers and water tables. We have strict laws about the disposal of human waste but none for the animal equivalent, and according to Worldwatch Institute, U.S. livestock produces
130 times
more waste than people do! In fact, one farm in Utah with 500,000 pigs produces more fecal matter than the 1.5 million inhabitants of Manhattan.
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All this toxic poo is doing real damage: With so many farms along the banks of the Mississippi, agricultural waste is leaching into the river at an alarming rate. There is so much excess nitrogen from fertilizer and excrement, in fact, that it has created what’s called “the Dead Zone” at the mouth of the river, in the Gulf of Mexico. This dead zone, which has no oxygen and therefore cannot sustain any life, was almost 8,000 square miles in size in 2008.
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Whoa. Next time you tuck into a juicy steak, know that it is responsible for 17 times more water pollution than a bowl of noodles.
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Meat wastes water:
Forty-two percent
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of the fresh water available to us in the United States is used for agriculture. Some is used to grow grain for us, some for growing grain for animals, and some for hydrating and washing the animals. It takes 441 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, and that’s according to what the Cattlemen’s Association says. Dr. Georg Borgstrom, who chairs the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University, thinks it’s more like 2,500 gallons. That’s not 2,500 gallons per cow—it’s per pound of beef. By comparison, it takes only 33 gallons of water to grow a pound of carrots. One 16-ounce steak uses the amount of water you need for 6 months of showers! Holy cow!
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Animals eat a lot of food:
Did you know that more than 50 percent of the corn grown in the United States is eaten by animals?
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Roughly
8 percent
of corn grown is for human food use.
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Sixty million acres of the United States are devoted to growing hay
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primarily for livestock, while we use only 13 million acres to grow fruits and vegetables.
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While 1.2 billion people do not have enough to eat every day, we’re bending over backward to make damn sure the 20 billion cows, pigs, and chickens are getting fatter and fatter by the minute.

The meat industry is oil-hungry:
It takes more than 11 times the energy to create animal protein than grain protein.
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When you take into account the fuel used for planting, watering, and harvesting of the grain a cow eats, its transportation, the energy used by factory farms, transportation of the cows to slaughter, and then the distribution of the meat to you . . . that Big Mac looks more like it’s made of fossil fuel than beef. Because the average American eats 97 pounds of beef a year, our national burger-lust requires the energy equivalent of a mere
29
billion
gallons of gas!

Cows are cute, but they are wrecking America:
The meat industry is clearly siphoning off a disproportionate share of precious resources like fuel and water, but the grazing of cattle is wreaking havoc on the land itself. Cows and other livestock are wandering around on approximately 160 million acres
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of federally owned land leased to farmers. And their innocent grazing isn’t so innocent. More than half of the topsoil of the American West has been lost since cattle started grazing 140 years ago. According to
Mad Cowboy
by
Howard Lyman,
it takes nature from 100 to 800 years to create a single inch of topsoil, and since the birth of this country, we’ve lost 6 full inches. That might just sound like a bunch of dirt disappearing, but topsoil is the incubator of life itself. Without it, no plants can grow, and without plants, all animals die. By allowing millions of cows to stomp on, poo on, and kick up precious topsoil, we are shooting ourselves in the collective hoof. When enough soil is dried or displaced, a negative spiral begins that causes rich, fertile soil to become desert. And there’s no recovery from that anywhere in the near future. Desertification from overgrazing is a global problem.

Imagine if we stopped the damage now and what we could do with that real estate. We could be growing food for
people
. We could plant trees to absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. We could restore natural habitats for wild animals and preserve biodiversity. Many of the world’s problems could be solved if livestock were taken out of the picture.

And let’s not forget what happens when wild animals start to compete with the cows for this federal land or threaten the herds. One and a half million wild animals, such as bears, bobcats, foxes, mountain lions, and even domestic pets are killed each year to protect cattle.
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In other words, we kill one animal to protect
another
animal only to turn around and
kill
that animal to feed an appetite that is killing us and the planet! How crazy is that?

We’re messing with the ocean:
Once thought to be an inexhaustible source of food, the ocean today is actually being fished out. Because there are fewer fish, we’re having to go deeper and deeper into the ocean to find them, and we’re displacing all sorts of marine creatures and plants that are essential members of the food chain in the process. Fish farming is unfortunately not the solution, since it takes 2 to 5 pounds of small wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed salmon.
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That formula is obviously totally unsustainable.

We’re destroying the rain forest:
It’s one thing to damage our own country, but our lust for cheap burgers is creating so much demand for beef that the South and Central American cattle industries are clearing rain forest to make room for cattle pasture. In fact, cattle grazing is the number one factor in the destruction of the rain forest, and we’re losing 2.4 acres of it
per second.
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That’s 144 acres per minute. Seventy-five
million
acres per year! Rain forest used to cover 14 percent of the earth, but now it covers only 6 percent. You see, every hamburger requires a plot of land the size of a small kitchen to be cleared. Is that burger worth it?