Going vegetarian is the most effective lifestyle change an individual can make to mitigate climate change. It is comparable to all your transport emissions - in fact it's greener than ditching your car. 

No one has a right to tell you what to eat, and I am certainly not going to -- it's very uncool to be greener than thou -- but let's look at what the meat is costing us, in health and environment.

According to a New Scientist article (published two years ago) 1 kg of beef has a carbon footprint of 40 kg in CO2 equivalent (mostly in the form of methane released by the cows), which is equivalent to driving a car for 3 hours at 50 mph. This doesn't take into account the indirect emissions of the over 10,000 litres of water that would take to produce that meat, over 100 kg of soybeans (and their emissions in terms of fertilisers and damage to the environment from clearing rainforest land for soybean crops). So the real carbon footprint and cost to the environment is much higher.

Eating meat has also been linked to obesity, cancer, liver, kidney, lung and reproductive disorders, birth defects, miscarriages and nervous system disorders. David Steinman cites in his book "Diet for a Poisoned Planet" that 99% of all toxic compounds in food are in meat, dairy and eggs, and 50% of all animal products contain carcinogenic contaminants. The US Food and Drug Administration put together a Total Diet Study that found that bacon had 124 toxic residues from pesticides and other industrial pollutants. Fast food burgers have 285 residues and butter 384.

It's quite significant that all factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs and dairy, contain antibiotics, pesticides, steroids and growth hormones. Dr Paula Baillie-Hamilton says in her book "The Body Restoration Plan" that antibiotics and pesticides are found to slow down metabolism in humans, cause an increase in appetite, and decrease the ability to burn stored fat. The end result is poorer health and weight gain. Broiler chicken are also found to be a hotbed of disease, and according to the US National Research Council, the majority of poultry (over 90% in some cases) are contaminated with salmonellosis. They also contain carcinogens that survive the process of cooking.

Animals are reared in such inhumane conditions and sprayed with tons of antibiotics and pesticides taht are also prone to developing antibiotic-resistant strains of superbugs, which can then be passed on to humans. The swine flu virus is one such example.  

Brunella 

brunella@carbonica.org