VEGAN:
A vegetarian who eats plant products only, especially one who
uses no products derived from animals, as
fur or leather... someone who eats no animal or dairy products
at all.
Every year in the U.S.,
more than 25 billion animals are slaughtered for food. Raising
animals on factory farms
is cruel and ecologically devastating. Eating animals is bad for
our health, leading directly to many diseases
and illnesses, including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes,
and obesity.
Animals on factory farms
are treated like machines. Within days of birth, for example,
chickens have their beaks
seared off with a hot blade. Male cows and pigs are castrated
without painkillers. All of these animals spend
their brief lives in crowded and ammonia-filled conditions, many
of them so cramped that they can't even turn
around or spread a wing. Many do not get a breath of fresh air
until they are prodded and crammed onto trucks
for a nightmarish ride to the slaughterhouse, often through weather
extremes and always without food or water.
The animals are hung upside down and their throats are sliced
open, often while they're fully conscious.
Today's factory farms use
everything but the "moo," "cluck," and "oink"
- but in the process, they leave behind an
environmental devastation that generations to come will be forced
to clean up. Raising animals for food requires
more than half the water used in the United States and is the
biggest polluter of our water and topsoil. Coyotes
and other animals are poisoned and shot by western cattle ranchers
who consider federal land to be their land
for grazing. Our country's meat addiction is slowly poisoning
and depleting our land, water, and air.
The only two researchers
in human history who have successfully reversed heart disease,
by far America's
biggest killer, have included an exclusively vegetarian diet as
a part of their programs. On the Dr. Dean Ornish
and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn programs, patients become "heart
attack proof" (to quote Dr. Esselstyn, in the
August 1999 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology) by getting
their cholesterol levels to below 150 (the
average vegan cholesterol level is 128), the level below which
no one has ever been documented as having
died from a heart attack. And people who consume animal products
are also 40 percent more susceptible to
cancer, and at increased risk for many other illnesses, including
stroke, obesity, appendicitis, osteoporosis,
arthritis, diabetes, and food poisoning. Additionally, meat contains
accumulations of pesticides and other
chemicals up to 14 times more concentrated than those in plant
foods.
Meat stinks for the animals,
the Earth, and your health. Make the compassionate, environmentally
sound,
and healthful choice - go vegan (or at least vegetarian)!