I have done extensive research last weekend about food. I urgently recommend that you watch three documentaries and do some of your own research online.
1. The first one to watch is Food Inc. It shows clearly the forces and wrong doing of our modern food society. The forces behind our modern food industry – the seed companies, the farmers, the animals – everything we do is just wrong and bad for everybody. I warn you, you will be in shock after watching it and you probably will not buy any meat in a long time. If you are interested in systematic evil – it is the red line in the documentary. Our modern Food is controlled by only a handful cooperations using all means to fool you into eating the wrong food.
2. The second one I highly recommend you watch is Forks over Knives. The major storyline in the film traces the personal journeys of a pair of pioneering yet under-appreciated researchers, Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn. They both think that a whole food plant based diet is the solution to many health problems. They even think they can reduce 70% – 80% of all health care spending through the diet. Dr. Esselstyn has set up a website, if you have health problems you might want to head over there and start changing your diet. If you are healthy, start it anyways to live longer and happier.
3. The third documentary I watched is called The End of the Line. If you think eating fish is a good idea and you just skip the meat – watch this documentary and you will never eat fish again without a bad taste in your mouth. The oceans are getting pretty empty and there will be no more fish anymore.
Watch the above and help spreading the word. I think a whole food plant based diet isn’t that bad of an option for all of us. Right now, we are facing systematic evil from the food industry. The produce and sell us food that makes us sick and burden us with health care costs on top of it. Only a few people profit from the system. And they keep getting richer and richer. They have set up the perfect system where policy makers, industry, government, health care all work against us. Perfect systematic evil.
How can we change? Start the change by changing your diet! (read more below, I have taken it from Leo Babauta and his fantastic blog.)
Why Should I Change?
There are a few important reasons to eat plants:
- Health. The basis of this guide is health, and many people switch to eating plants because they want to lose weight, improve their heart health, stay healthy as they age, improve blood pressure or deal with diabetes. A plant-based diet has been shown to help with all of these things — if you also stay away from the processed foods. A diet of processed flour and sugar and fried foods isn’t healthy even if it’s all plants (more on this below). The healthiest populations in the world are plant based: the Okinawans (traditionally at almost all plants such as sweet potatoes, soybeans, lots of veggies, with a little fish and occasional pork), the Sardinians (beans & veggies, red wine, some cheese, meat only once a week), and the vegan Seventh-Day Adventists in Loma Linda, California who are the longest-living Americans. Eating plants is the best thing you can do to reduce your risk of the leading causes of death.
- Environment. Honestly, while this is very important to me, it’s probably the least important of the three reasons on this list (for me personally, that is). But it’s huge: the biggest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating animal products — better than giving up a car (next best) or using less energy in your home or traveling by plane less or recycling or using solar energy or driving an electric car or buying fewer things. The animals we raise for food production use a ton of resources, eat way more plants than we do (which in turn also require resources to be grown), give off huge amounts of planet-warming methane, breathe out a lot of carbon dioxide, and create a lot of pollution. This 2006 United Nations report concludes that “Livestock have a substantial impact on the world’s water, land and biodiversity resources and contribute significantly to climate change. Animal agriculture produces 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (CO2 equivalents), compared with 13.5 percent from all forms of transportation combined.” And it takes 4,000 to 18,000 gallons of water to make the beef for one hamburger, according to a recent report from the U.S. geological survey.
- Compassion. For me, this is the most important reason to move away from eating animals. I’ve talked a lot about compassion on this site, but by far the most cruel thing any of us does each day is consume animals (and their products). The cruelty that is perpetuated on these living, feeling, suffering beings on our behalf is enormous and undeniable. If you don’t believe me, watch this video with Sir Paul McCartney or this video about pigs. While I became vegan for health reasons, I stick with it for reasons of compassion — wanting to reduce the suffering of othersentient beings.