World Vegetarian Day 2007: Big Macs and the Climate, Milk and Your Health

Vegetarian life-style is healthier, climate friendly

By Len Frenkel

Today is World Vegetarian Day. It may not seem significant to your life, so let me show you how seriously it impacts all of us.

Americans, as well as the people of most Western nations, are obsessed with meat and dairy foods. Every restaurant proudly advertises its selection of meat entrees. Almost everyone believes that meat and dairy are essential to life, that without them we could not survive in good health.

The meat and dairy industries advertise their products to persuade us that they are good for our health. These are multibillion-dollar conglomerates, and when the grain and soy industries that feed the meat industries are thrown in, they become the largest industry in the country.

These foods are literally killing us. Kerrie Saunders, Ph.D., author of ''The Vegan Diet as Chronic Disease Prevention'' asserts that 80 to 90 percent of our common chronic diseases are related to our heavy reliance on meat and dairy. Half of our people are dying from heart disease, which is largely preventable by dietary changes.

Likewise diabetes is preventable by eliminating high fat animal foods and substituting plant foods. Several cancers, such as breast, colon and prostate are strongly related to animal food consumption. Many digestive system ailments are also caused by these foods. We can only guess what the impact of all these dietary-related diseases is on our health and insurance systems, especially Medicare.

Many folks have chosen a vegetarian lifestyle out of empathy for the 10 billion factory-farmed animals raised each year for food in this country. Most of us are aware of these conditions but choose to ignore them. So we go through life in a state of denial, rarely thinking about the animals as we munch on a steak, pork chop or lamb roast.

It is difficult to visualize the overall environmental impact of raising animals for food, but it is definitely there, affecting every one of us. Even Al Gore, in his movie ''An Inconvenient Truth,'' skips over the animal agriculture effect on global warming. Glenn Beck of FOX News has criticized Gore for ignoring the role that meat plays in global warming.

Some data will help visualize the environmental situation. About 70 percent of our grain production, notably corn, barley and oats, goes to feed factory-farmed animals; 80 percent of the soybeans likewise go to animals, not tofu. Animal waste is between 3-4 trillion pounds per year, amounting to about 125 times as much as all Americans produce.

Half of our water usage is for food animals. The vast majority of our land goes to livestock grazing and growing crops for feeding cows, pigs and chickens. Worldwide, enormous acreage of tropical rain forests has been leveled to provide for cattle feed and ranching.

These extreme usages are wasteful of our resources and can only lead to further environmental destruction. Then there is the issue of greenhouse gases and their contribution to the global warming. Methane from cattle is responsible for almost 20 percent of the total greenhouse gas load.

Methane is more than 20 times as powerful as carbon dioxide in warming our planet. As for the major greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, think about the fuel consumed to grow, harvest and transport the crop foods; to manufacture the fertilizer; to drive irrigation pumps; to fuel the trucks that move the meat to our supermarkets, and the energy used to cook the meats.

Researchers from the University of Chicago have calculated that more energy is used, and carbon dioxide produced, from meat production than is used in all forms of transportation.

Our obsession with animal-eating, then, is at a critical stage. Unless many more millions of people adopt vegetarian life-styles, our health will continue to decline and the environment will continue to deteriorate as we consume our resources beyond sustainability and destroy the conditions that make our planet livable.

We are at a global ''tipping point,'' requiring major changes in our attitudes and behaviors. Becoming vegetarian is one of those changes, as have more than 800 people in the Lehigh Valley who have chosen healthy and vital living. So today, show your support for your health and the health of the planet by having a meat-free day and consider making it the first of many healthy days.

Len Frenkel of Upper Saucon Township is a member of Sustainable Communities of the Lehigh Valley and is president of Lehigh Valley Vegetarians.

Source: The Morning Call

***

The Truth About Milk

By Dave Rietz

(Excerpts)

POLLUTION

There are around 9.2 million dairy cows in the United states. Each dairy cow ingests around 330 pounds of feed (perhaps 50 pounds) and water (around 280 pounds or 33 gallons) per day. Allowing for the best dairy production of 55 pounds of milk per day (over ten times what mother nature designed the cow to produce) that means that what remains becomes "slurry".

That means around 275 pound of urine and feces per day... per cow, for a daily total of 2.53 BILLION pounds of pollution. Per year... that amounts to around 923 billion pounds of UNTREATED pollution entering our streams, rivers, lakes... and drinking water systems.

Cows are hot-blooded mammals. Like all other mammals they pass gas. Somewhat like elephants their compartmented digestive system is rather inefficient... which leads to the creation of MORE gas. During a Discovery Channel documentary on elephants a parting quip was that the average adult elephant passes enough methane gas per day to run a car about 20 miles.

Cows are not much better. The English New Scientist (page 5 -31.8.96) mentions that cattle produce around 48 kilograms (105 pounds) of methane each per year and that more bubbles out of the animals' manure. Dairy cows eat more because they produce milk. With 9.2 million dairy cows times a minimum of 100 pounds of methane gas per year... that amounts almost a billion pounds of methane gas released into the atmosphere each year.

With around 100 million beef cattle... pigs, sheep, and other "factory farmed" animals it should not be difficult to fathom the extent of this problem.

This means that "Beef is a greenhouse-intensive food" and a major cause of global warming (with dairy a significant part of the problem).

Another major point is:

"Milk is a very strong pollutant: it is about 400 times more polluting than untreated sewage. To put it another way, 1,000 gallons of milk has the same polluting potential as the untreated sewage from a town of 7,000 people." Morlais Owen. Chief Scientist for Welsh Water. North Wales Weekly News. 24.3.88.

***

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ON MILK

Q: What is WHEY?

A: Whey results when the FAT and CASEIN are removed from milk.
In making cheese, the curds become the cheese.

Whey's main components are bovine serum albumin and lactalbumin.
There are other hormones contained in whey.

Q: What happens to the:

59 hormones, scores of allergens herbicides, pesticides, dioxins
up to 52 antibiotics

When made into cheese?

A: Everything gets concentrated.

When made into butter?

A: The allergens get lost: but the dioxin's and
pesticides and antibiotics remain in the fat.

In the digestive system?

A: Steroid hormones survive, as do dioxins and antibiotics.
In homogenized milk, protein hormones survive... depending upon the
gastric pH, some protein hormones in cheese survive, but not all...
eleven steroid hormones survive.

AND WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Eventually, everything is broken down, but not before the chemical messengers (hormones) "deliver their message."

Each of those hormones and proteins acts differently and has different rates of degradation. BOTTOM LINE... they all survive to a certain degree... and the effects are cumulative.

OTHER HEATH-TRASHING SUBSTANCES IN COW'S MILK

Whey: Blood proteins. Bovine serum lactalbumin has been identified as a trigger for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases.

Lactose: Two sugars. Glucose and galactose. Galactose has been indentified as a trigger for glaucoma. There are several columns that cover lactose (covering galactose and galactosemia):

***

REFERENCES + RESOURCES

http://www.notmilk.com/deb/090599.txt -- Dr. Gordon: Heart Disease
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/notmilk/message/629 -- Lactose is dangerous
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/notmilk/message/453 -- Ben's heart
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/notmilk/message/396 -- Female Cancers
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/notmilk/message/378 -- Lactose intolerance

Colostrum (cow's first milk): Loaded with hormones, particularly IGF-I, along with loads of immunizing agents for COW DISEASES.

Answers courtesy of the NOTMILKMAN. (notmilkman@notmilk.com)

MILK...What a surprise!

Read what a NOTMILK guest book respondent said:
http://www.notmilk.com/gbooktalk.txt

For more of the WHOLE truth... visit:

For all past newsletters visit with a wealth of information:
http://www.notmilk.com/deb/column.html

and for the Daily Squirts of NOTMILK wisdom...
http://www.notmilk.com/deb/squirts.html

Diabetics please read

http://www.notmilk.com/deb/011099.html

Read up on "mad cow disease"

Visit http://www.milkgate.com/ for what may well be mankind's NEXT plague.

http://www.notmilk.com/milkinfo.txt my 2400 word overview (this file)
http://www.notmilk.com/wholemilk.txt USDA facts, and what they omitted
http://www.notmilk.com/52reasons.txt A reason for every week of the year

Perhaps the BEST single reference:

http://www.notmilk.com/a-z.txt -- Extensive reasons by ailment/topic

***

QUOTES

"It's not natural for humans to drink cow's milk. Humans milk is for humans. Cow's milk is for calves. You have no more need of cow's milk than you do rats milk, horses milk or elephant's milk. Cow's milk is a high fat fluid exquisitely designed to turn a 65 lb baby calf into a 400 lb cow. That's what cow's milk is for!" --Dr Michael Klaper MD

"I no longer recommend dairy products after the age of 2 years. Other calcium sources offer many advantages that dairy products do not have." --Dr. Benjamin Spock

Read The Truth About Milk at Rense.com