Forks Over Knives (10 page)

Farms are the leading cause of soil erosion by far, and that erosion—topsoil mixed with agrochemicals and animal waste—leads directly to sedimentation and pollution of watersheds, reservoirs, lakes, and oceans. Approximately 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land is seriously degraded, according to scientists at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Animal farming accounts for about 55 percent of soil erosion, and the soil is being depleted at ten to forty times the rate it is being formed. Since cattle began dominating the U.S. plains 140 years ago, more than half of the topsoil in the western United States has been lost.

According to a 2006 University of Chicago study, the average American diet derives 47 percent of its calories from animal products. This amounts to a carbon “footprint” (i.e., impact) of 2.52 tons of CO
₂
emissions per person per year. Those people who are especially partial to red meat—who get, say, 50 percent of their caloric intake from steaks and such—have an average carbon footprint of 3.57 tons.

If the average American meat eater were to reduce his or her intake of animal produce to 25 percent of total calories, it would reduce his or her footprint by approximately one ton. Adopting a purely plant-based diet
would mean a two-ton reduction in carbon emissions. In fact, if every American simply reduced chicken consumption by one meal per week, the CO
₂
savings would be equivalent to removing 500,000 cars from the road.

Consider this: If the entire U.S. population were to adopt a plant-based diet for just one day, the nation would conserve the following resources
*
:

• 100 billion gallons of drinking water, enough for every person in every home in New England for nearly four months

• 1.5 billion pounds of crops, enough to feed the population of New Mexico for over a year

• 70 million gallons of gasoline, enough to fuel every car in Canada and Mexico

• 33 tons of antibiotics.

Meanwhile, the following environmental damage would be prevented:

• 1.2 million tons of CO
₂
greenhouse emissions

• 3 million tons of soil erosion

• 4.5 million tons of animal waste

• 7 tons of ammonia emissions.

Worldwide, farm animals consume 756 million tons of grain. According to Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, an equivalent amount would be enough to provide the 1.4 billion people living in abject poverty with approximately three pounds of grain per day—twice the amount necessary to survive. Moreover, this figure does not include the 225 million tons of soy produced annually, nearly all of which is consumed by farm animals.

“The world is not running out of food,” Singer writes in his book,
The Life You Can Save
. “The problem is that we—the relatively affluent—have found a way to consume four or five times as much food as would be possible if we were to eat the crops we grow directly.”

Albert Einstein summed it up best: “Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

*
Compiled from scientific reports by Noam Mohr, a physicist with the New York University Polytechnic Institute.

Now that you know the advantages of a
whole-foods, plant-based
diet, it’s time to start cooking whole-foods, plant-based meals. Following are tips you can use to learn more about good nutrition, turn into a smart shopper, stock up your kitchen, and transition to a healthy plant-based diet.

In an ideal world, everyone would be eating whole foods that arrive without any kind of plastic packaging and, therefore, without that long list of ingredients telling you what’s inside—some of it good, most of it bad, and some of it simply mysterious, such as strange compounds that sound less like food and more like something concocted in a chemistry lab.

In the real world, however, even people who have considered themselves to be healthy, whole-plant food eaters for years consume some multi-ingredient foods, which are therefore processed to some degree. Some of these even contain those mystery ingredients.

The ingredient list is the most important piece of text on a product’s packaging because it shows, in descending order by weight, everything you are about to put into your body. Be wary of label manipulation. For example, manufacturers often alter their ingredients lists to make it seem as if certain foods are included in lesser quantities than they actually are. This happens most often with sugars. In a practice commonly known as “ingredient splitting,” manufacturers use more than one kind of sweetener, such as cane sugar, corn syrup, beet sugar, fructose, and so on, to push what might have been the top-listed ingredient (i.e., heaps of sugar) further down the list so that healthier ingredients can be listed first.

Likewise, expect the unexpected. Foods that you may imagine to be whole and healthy may not be. For example, you may think that you know which foods are high in sodium and which are low, but look again: A seemingly innocent can of vegetable juice may contain up to half of your daily allowance of salt.

Unwanted foods pop up in unexpected places. Dairy appears more often than you would think in products that may not seem to be dairy foods at all: potato chips, breakfast cereals, tomato sauces, and many other nondairy foods. Even some so-called dairy-free cheeses actually contain cow’s milk derivatives. That’s because dairy products are listed often using terms that you might not recognize:
casein, whey, whey protein, albumen, caseinate, sodium caseinate, lactose, lactic acid, rennet,
and
rennin
, to name a few.

Also, pay attention to serving size. One of the ways that manufacturers fool consumers into buying their products is to make them seem lighter on calories and fat by reducing the serving size listed on the container.

For instance, there’s one product in most people’s homes whose label indicates that it contains no fat, and yet it is 100 percent fat. This is cooking spray. The reason cooking spray can be all fat and yet call itself “nonfat” is that, according to the Food and Drug Administration, any food that contains less than a half-gram of fat per serving can be called “fat free.” A single serving of cooking spray is one incredibly quick spritz—small enough to be less than a half-gram of fat—but most cooks use more than that. Remember: Cooking spray is just fat under a “fat free” label.

Of course, one way to avoid confusion over food labels is to purchase only whole-plant foods. Broccoli, cabbage, bananas, oats, lentils, and other whole-plant foods need no ingredient lists. However, if they had labels, these would look great!

The great Greek doctor Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Now, imagine if food was actually regulated like medicine: What if food producers had to follow the same requirements the pharmaceutical industry must follow when medical studies tie a product to a significant risk of serious or life-threatening effects?

A platter of
tree nuts, legumes, alliums (onions and garlic), vegetables, fruits, and grains
might carry this warning label:

FOOD FACTS

Active Ingredients

Fiber and essential nutrients, including plant protein, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals (such as carotenoids, flavonoids, terpenes, sterols, indoles, and phenols) and antioxidants that have shown benefit against certain cancers in experimental studies.

Warnings

ALLERGENS:
Contains tree nuts, legumes (peanuts and soybeans), and the grains wheat, rye and barley (which contain gluten, a protein composite).

Purpose

For the promotion of good health. These ingredients may reduce the risk of some forms of cancer, heart disease, stroke, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, constipation, osteoporosis and other diet-related chronic diseases.

Directions

ALL AGES:
Consume three to five servings per day, raw or cooked.

Other Information

May be stored at room temperature or refrigerated for days to weeks.

Inactive Ingredients

Peels, shells, and other biodegradable materials.

A platter of
meat, fish, and dairy,
on the other hand, would carry a more extensive label that might look something like this:

FOOD FACTS

Active Ingredients

Essential nutrients, including protein, vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids.

Warnings

ALLERGENS:
Contains milk or milk products, eggs, fish, and shellfish.

ASK A DOCTOR BEFORE USE IF YOU HAVE:
Cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, hypertension, obesity, or osteoporosis, or if you are pregnant or nursing.

BIOLOGICAL AGENTS:
All primary food-borne pathogens derive from animals, including:

• BACTERIA:
Salmonella, Clostridium perfringens, Campylobacter, Staphylococcus aureus, Shigella, E. coli
O157:H7,
Yersinia enterocolitica
, and
Bacillus cereus
, among others

• PARASITES:
Parasitic protozoa, roundworms, and tapeworms

• PRIONS:
These proteins in misfolded form may cause Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) or Variant CreutzfeldtJakob Disease (vCJD)

• VIRUSES:
Rotaviruses, astroviruses, and bovine leukemia viruses.

CHEMICAL AND OTHER ETIOLOGICAL AGENTS:
May contain arsenicals, pesticides, mercury, chromium, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), dioxins, and chemically related compounds. Meat and meat products may contain slaughter waste, antibiotics, artificial growth hormones, veterinary drug residues, trioxypurine, adrenalin, cholesterol, and fecal matter. Fish and shellfish may contain potent marine biotoxins.

BIOACCUMULATION IN ANIMAL TISSUES:
Chemical and other etiological agents build up in fat, so low levels in animal feed can produce harmful concentrations in human foods
such as meat (including fish), milk, cheese, and eggs. Tuna and other large fish store more mercury than smaller fish because they live longer and ingest smaller fish who themselves store mercury. The primary means of human exposure to dioxins is through the consumption of animal fats, in which dioxins accumulate. Further bioaccumulation occurs when humans consume these animal products. Women can transmit these toxins to fetuses through placental tissue and to infants through breast milk.

OTHER RISK FACTORS:
May increase risk of heart disease, cancer, obesity, iron deficiency, asthma, birth defects, ear infections, stomachaches, bloating, diarrhea, gout, hyper-cholesterolemia, angina, hypertension, prostate disease, multiple sclerosis, kidney stones, cataracts, osteoporosis, diabetes (I and II), rheumatoid arthritis, macular degeneration, hypertension, acne and other skin conditions, migraine, lupus, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s disease, cognitive dysfunction, erectile dysfunction, irritable bowel syndrome, body odor, and bad breath.

GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH RISKS:
Feeding practices and intensive confinement of genetically similar animals fuel zoonotic pathogen adaptation and restrict animals’ evolution for resistance to pathogens. Approximately 73 percent of the emerging human pathogens are transmitted to people from animals. The transfer of multi-drug-resistant pathogens from farms and food to humans (e.g., avian influenza H5N1 and swine flu) constitutes a serious biomedical, public health, and biodefense threat. In the United States, farm animals generate three times more excrement than humans, and this waste contaminates water, land, crops, other vegetation, and the air. A United Nations report names animal agriculture as one of the largest sources of global warming emissions. The public risks from consuming animal products (e.g., infectious diseases, widespread pollution, global warming, and shortages of energy, water, and food) may exceed the personal health risks.

Purpose

To prevent starvation. There are virtually no nutrients in animal-based foods that are not better provided by plants. Reliance solely on animal products may create nutritional deficiencies.

Directions

Ask a doctor or health professional before use.

Wash your hands after coming into contact with animal products, and wash cooking, serving, eating, and food preparation surfaces and utensils after they come into contact with animal products. Keep out of reach of children until properly cooked.

Approximately one in six Americans gets sick from food-borne diseases every year. Follow recommended storage temperatures and maximum storage times before and after cooking. Cook meats to an internal temperature of 165
^°
F or greater. Discard beef suspected to contain bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), as the pathogens cannot be killed via cooking—however, this may not be discoverable, as a single hamburger may contain meat from hundreds of animals, and the USDA has banned private-party BSE testing in the United States. Prion proteins, the precursors of prions, have been discovered in pasteurized milk, and this could represent a risk of exposure to transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), including BSE. Cooking animal tissues can create known carcinogens. Animal flesh should be sufficiently heated to prevent food poisoning from pathogens, but not heated enough to create excessive cancer-causing agents.