Animal Products
Commercially produced animal products are commonly derived from animals that were pumped full of drugs, steroids, hormones and antibiotics. Many of these animals were also fed the remains of sick, dead or dying animals, and plant foods that were grown using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Yet no matter how animals are raised, what they are fed or how the products derived from them are processed and prepared, all animal products are an expensive, unhealthy, unnecessary waste of land, water and other natural resources. For example:
It is so expensive to produce and transport animal products that few could afford to buy them if it weren't for our tax dollars being
used to pay government subsidies to commercial producers.
Animal products are cooked at high temperatures to kill or inhibit the growth and reproduction of pathogens, thereby reducing the
possibility of infections and illness due to the wide range of pathogenic germs, which all animals (including ourselves) carry. Heating
foods to over 118 degrees denatures or destroys nearly all nutrients however, including the enzymes and other co-factors necessary for
the digestion of food and absorption of nutrients.
Most animals contain DDT (a single ounce of which can kill ten million people), most fish and all sea food contains at least trace amounts
of mercury and yet, only 1-2 of the 500,000 animals slaughtered every hour in the US are tested for toxic residues.
1 acre of trees are cleared every eight seconds to make way for croplands, not to feed those dying of starvation, but to instead use over
half of all US water supplies and 95% of all grain grown in the US for the raising of cattle. Livestock also accounts for about one billion
tons of un-recycled waste and 16% of all methane gas emissions worldwide every year, inevitably resulting in agricultural wastes which end
up in the air, soil and our water supplies.
It takes up to 100 times more water to raise animals for food than to produce the same amount of food from plants, and animals require at
least 5-10 times as much space as plants to produce the same amount of nutrients. Twenty vegetarians could in fact be fed on the same amount
of land needed to feed one meat eating person.