If you care about the future of your children, you should preserve and protect our environment with numerous action. By going vegan, you will help to create your children’s future.
A plant-based diet is known to be very beneficial for your health (if you still have any doubts about that, you will change your idea after having read this post); but it, also, appears to be the best action one can do to help the environment.
Meat and Dairy Pollute More Than The Oil Industry
According to an article of Independent, the world’s top five meat and dairy corporations, when taken together, are responsible for more emissions than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP. Animal agriculture is, indeed, one of the principal polluting causes for the environment, and if we do nothing, according to the same article, the livestock sector by 2050 could be responsible for 80 percent of the allowable greenhouse gas budget.
According to this article, meat and dairy produce 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, while providing just 18% of calories and 37% of protein. The Environmental Working Group estimated that the carbon footprint of broccoli is nearly 13 times less than beef. If we compare beef to tofu, one of the main sources of protein in an average vegan diet, the first one results in up to 105kg of greenhouse gases per 100g of meat, while tofu produces less than 3.5kg.
Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, told ABC News,
“A global shift to a plant-based diet is a win-win for
both human health and the environment.”
You cannot imagine how much land is used by the meat and dairy industry
Many people asked me when they knew I was vegan if I knew that thousands of hectares of land were used for vegan products destroying the environment. This question put always a bitter smile on my face since I found funny this disinformation.
My friend didn’t know that the animal industry uses more than 83% of global farmland, an area equivalent to the US, CHINA, European Union and Australia combined.
By cutting out meat and dairy from our diets, we could reduce global farmland use by more than 75% and still feed the world.
In this article of The Guardian Joseph Poore, a researcher who led a study published in the journal Science, said at the University of Oxford, UK:
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use, and water use.”
Animal agriculture wastes giant quantities of water
One report cited in this article estimated that only one burger required to produce:
- 14.6 gallons of water
- 13.5 pounds of feed
- 64.5 square feet of land
To make a comparison, as we see in the infographic below, 1 pound of meat takes to produce 2,400 gallons of water, while 1 pound of wheat takes only 25 gallons (almost 100 times less water).
Dr. Francesco Branca, director of the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development at the World Health Organization, told ABC News that if we all ate a plant-based, whole food diet by 2050, it would allow growing world population to be fed and the planet to be protected.
With our personal choices we do make a difference, and going vegan may be our single biggest way to make our impact on the environment.
Go Vegan! Try this challenge
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