Destroying the health of the planet

Seeing this web site is about the health of the  population and the health of the planet and in light of what has been released on the BBC World News: ‘The processed meat industry is causing cancer.’ (WHO).  We need to look deeper into the continuing trend for more and more meat production in the world today.

It is a common fact that if land were diverted from meat production to growing fruits and vegetables there is immediately a ten fold increase in food production. Sorry, its got to be more than this as even growing vegetables on a highly intensive system produces 10 times more food than regular arable farming! 

70% of all the world’s antibiotics are used in unsustainable animal farming. If this is to continue then soon 10 million people will die every year due to the increase of drug resistant diseases. This activity alone could be said to be destroying the health of the planet.

Besides the fact one football pitch of rainforest is destroyed every second to make way for food production for animal farming or monoculture palm oil production, besides which is greatly contributing to green house gas emissions which is a major contributor to the devastating climate change we are witnessing, the philosophy that we need to eat meat is now becoming a dying philosophy. Rather we don’t need to eat meat if we want to live longer. Article from Boston University.

Even Arnold Swartzeneger has suggested that we should all go vegetarian one or two days a week. He has seen many body builders that are vegetarian and have built strong and healthy bodies. This corroborates the facts found by King in his research into China, Korea and Japan in the 1920’s. [Populations supported by sustainable agriculture were found to be up to 3,000 people per square mile, with no disease found.] (The Lost Science of Organic Cultivation, 1996)

In Hong Kong there are quite a few successful vegetarian restaurants because they know they have to go vegetarian at least once a week for their health. This has been going on for years. Article from the United Nations University.

So as these facts are correct and are so far undisputed we had better change what we are doing if we want to get a different result.

According to Cornell University professor David Pimentel “If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million,”  And no doubt there health would be greatly improved too.

What would this mean the world over?

We keep talking about saving the planet – surely this is one of the easiest ways to do it.

Animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein, according to the Cornell ecologist’s analysis.

This suggests that we don’t actually need the amount of protein in our bodies to sustain a long and healthy life.

see the full article from the Cornell University.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/1997/08/us-could-feed-800-million-people-grain-livestock-eat