ANIMAL FORUM

Published on Saturday, May 17, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

Top Ten Reasons to Go Vegetarian During World Vegetarian Week
(May 19-25)
by Bruce Friedrich

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg
lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety
of vegetarian faux meats like bacon and sausages - along with an
ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants -
vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week beginning on Monday, here without
further ado are PETAs picks for the top 10 reasons to give vegetarian
eating a try.

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor

While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the
diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven
times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals
http://goveg.com/worldhunger.asp so that people can eat meat. Is
the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but its about
one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty?
Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals

The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now
distant memories. On todays factory farms http://www.meat.org/,
animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds,
wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These
animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do
anything else that is natural and important to them. They wont even
get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air
until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment

A recent United Nations report entitled Livestocks Long Shadow
http://www.goveg.com/eco concludes that eating meat is one of the
. most significant contributors to the most serious environmental
problems, at every scale from local to global. In just one example,
eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions
than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report
concludes that the meat industry should be a major policy focus when
dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air
pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.

4. Avoid Bird Flu

The World Health Organization says that if the avian flu virus mutates,
it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs,
eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or
eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other
problems with factory farming - from foot-and-mouth to SARS
http://goveg.com/AnimalBorneDiseases.asp - can be avoided with a
general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If You Wouldnt Eat a Dog, You Shouldnt Eat a Chicken

Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who
are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and
worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs
http://goveg.com/amazingAnimals.asp and even do some things that
have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans,
who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University
in Australia, says, As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these
attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think Im talking
about monkeys.

6. Heart Disease: Our Number One Killer

Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide
protection against numerous diseases, including the United States three
biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes
http://goveg.com/healthConcerns.asp. Drs. Dean Ornish and Caldwell
Esselstyn - two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and
reversing heart disease - have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as
chronicled most recently in Dr. Esselstyns Prevent and Reverse Heart
Disease, which documents his 100 percent success rate for unclogging
peoples arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer: Our Number Two Killer

Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the worlds foremost epidemiological
scientists and the director of what The New York Times called the most
comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between
diet and the risk of developing disease. Dr. Campbells best-selling
book, The China Study http://www.thechinastudy.com/about.html, is a
must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarize it,
Dr. Campbell states, No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in
causing human cancer as animal protein.

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini

Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet
http://goveg.com/obesity.asp, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to
be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to
be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny
meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than
meat-eaters. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review
and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global Peace

Leo Tolstoy claimed that vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism.
His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be
eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals,
for no reason other than humans acquired taste for animals flesh. Great
humanitarians from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh
http://www.healthyat100.org/display.asp?catid=3&pageid=4 have argued
that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the
world a kinder place.

10. The Joy of Veggies

As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks http://www.vegcooking.com/
and restaurants shows, vegetarian foods rock. People report that when they
adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a center-of-the-
plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they
didnt even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney http://www.goveg.com/feat/paulmveg/ sums it all up,
If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating
meat. Thats the single most important thing you could do. Its staggering
when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one
shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.

So are you ready to give it a try? Check out VegCooking.com
http://www.vegcooking.com/ for recipes and meal plans and to take the
World Vegetarian Week 7-Day Pledge.

Bruce Friedrich is vice president for campaigns at PETA http://www.peta.org/.
Before joining PETA in 1996, Bruce spent six years running a shelter for
homeless families and the largest soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. He has
been a progressive and animal activist for more than 20 years.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/17/9018/

. , .

Eating less meat expands world grain supply: Courant Op-Ed from
PCRM

Eating Less Meat Expands World Grain Supply

HOPE FERDOWSIAN
May 20, 2008

Ntombi must be so hungry - and so desperate. Thats all I can think
as I read the endless stream of headlines about skyrocketing food
prices. Amid the talk of abstract economic factors, her memory
brings home the human cost of the worldwide food shortage.

I met Ntombi a few years ago when I was serving as a volunteer
physician in South Africa. An HIV-positive mother of three children,
she was struggling to raise her family on about a dollar a day. During
my time in sub-Saharan Africa, I met many other women much like
her. Their lives were hard then. But as rice and corn prices approach
record highs, their very survival may be at stake.

How did it come to this? Global food prices have risen more than 80
percent in the last three years, according to the World Bank. In the
developing world, escalating food insecurity has driven people to the
brink of desperation, sparking riots in Mexico, Haiti and Somalia.

The scarcity and price spikes can be chalked up to a range of causes,
from droughts and high oil prices to increased use of cropland for
production of ethanol and other biofuels. But there is another key
factor - the cheeseburger on your plate.

Meat-heavy diets play an important role in world hunger, primarily
because animal agriculture is a deeply inefficient way to produce food.
In 2006, researchers at theUniversity of Chicago noted that raising
animals for food requires 10 times as many crops as those required to
support plant-based diets. Industrial meat production also requires
enormous inputs of water, energy and other resources.

Thats why rising rates of meat consumption in China and India, where
a growing number of middle-class people are adopting Western dietary
patterns, spell deep trouble for the worlds food supplies. In China,
per capita meat consumption has increased 150 percent since 1980.

But before Americans point the finger at consumers in Beijing, we
should consider our own enormous appetite for cheeseburgers and
chicken wings. We raise and kill about 10 billion farm animals a year
in this country, and per capita meat consumption here has risen 50
percent over the past 50 years.

That requires massive resources. About 70 percent of corn grown in
America is used as feed for cattle, chicken and other animals, and
more than 60 percent of the entire landmass of the lower 48 states is
used for growing feed or raising animals.

Our meat dependency also has serious environmental consequences.
In late April, a report from the prestigious Pew Commission found that
industrial animal farms cause massive pollution and endanger human
health. A recent U.N. report indicted animal agriculture as playing a
key role in global warming.

But perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Americas meat-heavy diet
is the example were setting for the rest of the world. As U.S. fast-food
chains like McDonalds and KFC open hundreds of new restaurants in
Asia, our high-fat, high-cholesterol dietary patterns are going global.

That worldwide shift to meat-heavy diets is driving up obesity and
heart disease rates among wealthy consumers in many developing
countries, even as it leaves millions of others hungry.

It could get much worse. The worlds population is projected to top
9 billion by the middle of this century. If the global community tries to
provide each of those people with the 200 pounds of meat eaten by the
average American each year, we will face economic and environmental
disaster.

But this is one international crisis that every single one of us can help
solve - simply by moving away from our meat-heavy diets. If
consumers in the United States and around the world begin choosing
more vegetarian meals, well free up grains, cropland and other
important resources. And well take an important step toward ensuring
that people like Ntombi have enough food to get through the day.

Hope Ferdowsian works for the nonprofit vegan group Physicians
Committee for Responsible Medicine. This was distributed by
McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/editorials/hc-ferdowsian0520.artmay20,0,6443563.story