Greetings, noble-minded viewers. Advocacy of the plant-based diet as the most ecologically sensible solution has been pioneered by numerous environmental, animal, spiritual and scientific publications throughout the years. Their efforts are bearing fruit as evidenced in the recent prolific media coverage highlighting this important issue. Through its wide reach, mainstream media has catapulted the vegetarian solution to climate change to the forefront of public consciousness.

From major media personalities such as Oprah Winfrey to Larry King to Ellen Degeneres, who became vegan in the past months, the millions of viewers around the world who tune in daily to their shows are exposed to the topic of meat and its related harmful effects on the health of the planet and one’s personal wellbeing.

On CNN, the world’s first network to provide 24 hour news coverage, with programs available in over 212 countries and territories, Larry King brought in a panel of experts on his show, Larry King Live, to address how E. coli found in meat is life-threatening. It was revealed that many young children have suffered and died from eating E. coli-tainted beef, or from merely contacting an infected adult.

In 2007, a 22-year-old woman became paralyzed after eating a burger contaminated with E. coli. Following is the discussion, “Should Americans Banish the Burger?” aired on CNN and published on its website on October 13, 2009.

“One person who has said "no" to burgers is Bill Marler, an expert on foodborne illness litigation. "What happens in hamburger is the E. coli bacteria is in the guts of cows. And during the slaughtering process, those guts are nicked or there's fecal material on the hides. It gets on the red meat," Marler explained to King. For Barbara Kowalcyk, the issue is professional – - she's director of food safety at the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention.

But the issue is also deeply personal – her 2-year-old son, Kevin, died of complications due to E. coli infection in 2001. Kevin "went from being a perfectly healthy, beautiful child to being dead in 12 days. It was unbelievable," Kowalcyk told King. For another guest, even the promise of contamination-free beef wasn't enough.

Dr. Colin Campbell of Cornell University advocates a meat-free diet. Campbell said he grew up on a dairy farm and for a long time held to the belief that animal protein was an essential part of a healthy diet. He said the results of years of research changed his mind. The conclusion of his studies: "The closer we get to consuming a whole foods, plant-based diet, the healthier we're going to be on all accounts."”

In France, journalist Fabrice Nicolino published a 400 page book titled, “The Meat Industry Threatens the World” that thoughtfully and meticulously evidenced the adverse effects factory farms have on the climate, human health and biodiversity. Le Monde is the French daily newspaper of record that is widely respected for its journalistic integrity. On October 13, 2009, Hervé Kempf published an article title, “And if Meat Was Assassinated?” on Le Monde regarding Mr. Nicolino’s persuasive book.

“Pollution? By massive discharges of nitrogen, livestock farming causes invasions of green algae on many coasts. Soybean production in Latin America to provide food for animals, contributes to the degradation of the savannah and the Amazon. Deforestation is also directly linked to the desire to gain new lands for cattle in Brazil. More surprisingly, the importance of greenhouse gas emissions by some 20 billion animals that we breed: according to an FAO report, “Livestock emits more greenhouse gas emissions than all global transport”.

Health? The massive use of antibiotics as growth promoters has increased the resistance of many bacteria to antibiotics. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that excessive consumption of “factory” meat is a source of diseases. Moreover, as indicated by a report from the U.S. Department of Health, “because the highly concentrated breeding farms tend to gather large groups of animals on a small piece of land, they facilitate the transfer and mixing of viruses”.

Can this system last, given that it takes about seven from plants to produce one calorie of meat? No, says the author. … If you want to feed nine billion people by 2050, it will be necessary to limit the numbers of animals raised. And... eat less meat.”

Forbes magazine, a popular US business magazine that is available worldwide and in 8 local language editions, recently published an article on the eco-friendly efforts of Professor Patrick O. Brown, PhD., a pioneering biochemist at the prestigious Stanford University. Dr. Brown, who has been a vegetarian for 30 years and a vegan for 5, is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In the article titled, “Drop That Burger,” published in Forbes magazine on November 30, 2009, Matthew Herper wrote:

“He wants to put an end to animal farming, or at least put a significant dent in our global hunger for cows, pigs and chickens. "There's absolutely no possibility that 50 years from now this system will be operating as it does now," says Brown. "One approach is to just wait, and either we'll deal with it or we'll be toast. I want to approach this as a solvable problem."

Solution: "Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth." Brown thinks if he can convince food manufacturers that the costs of selling meat are too high, and rising, they'll come around. Seemingly tiny changes in economics could make animal farming a lot less affordable. At the moment farmers around the world are arguing they should be immune from taxes and ceilings on greenhouse gases; if they are not exempt, the cost of meat will go up.

Raising the price of water would have the same effect. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk. "If you're a big food producer now, this is absolutely inevitable," he says. "You'd better start thinking ahead. You'd better seriously start investing and trying to find alternatives in order to stay alive."”

Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television. After these brief messages, we’ll continue our show highlighting mainstream media coverage on the sustainable, plant-based diet as a solution to global warming.

Welcome back to our show featuring the increasing amount of press on the most effective, efficient, economical and ethical way to halt climate change – the veg lifestyle. This year, a significant increase in books with wide distribution have been published that examine the health, economics, ecology, and ethics of animal consumption.

These include: “The Face on Your Plate,” by Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a vegan; and “The Kind Diet,” by vegan actress Alicia Silverstone. Best selling American author and vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer also wrote “Eating Animals,” a non-fiction work that exposes the cruelty behind factory farms, which led him to raise his young children on a plant-based diet. This book has garnered much media attention from television to print mediums around the nation, with its truthful contents being presented for audiences to discern for themselves the morality in consuming animals.

After reading “Eating Animals,” popular actress Natalie Portman, who had been a long time vegetarian, wrote on October 27, 2009, an article titled, “Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan,” for The Huffington Post, a highly influential and popular news blog:

“The human cost of factory farming -- both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals -- is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig [excrement] sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.

I read the chapter on animal [excrement] aloud to two friends – one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn't eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental condition and their food.

The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards. And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?”

In New York Magazine, Sam Anderson also wrote of Mr. Foer’s compelling evidence for a vegetarian diet in his article titled, “Hungry? The Latest in a Bumper Crop of Books about the Ethics of Eating Animals” published on November 1, 2009.

“Foer’s depiction of the factory-farming system is brutal and thorough— strong enough, I imagine, to win some converts. He describes genetically freakish animals, some of whom can’t walk or mate, living in tiny cages in windowless sheds, suffering ritual mutilation and sloppy slaughtering (many of them end up getting boiled or skinned alive). Unprofitable babies are immediately disposed of: electrocuted, thrown into a chipper, bashed headfirst into a concrete floor, or (in the case of irrelevant male dairy calves) sold to veal farmers.

Slaughterhouse workers go crazy with sadism; toxic lakes of manure poison the environment. None of this is new, but, as Foer puts it, “we have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness.” The sheer brutality of the system seems to have pushed our centuries-long stalemate to a tipping point: Factory farming has become its own most powerful counterargument. And that transcends all cutesiness. As Foer’s guide at the turkey farm tells him, “The truth is so powerful in this case it doesn’t even matter what your angle is.””

A recent government funded report in the United Kingdom, which was produced by the renowned medical journal, The Lancet, once again identifies the reduction of meat as a key component in human and environmental health. On November 25, 2009, Kate Devlin wrote of this report in an article titled, “Eat Less Meat to Reduce Climate Change and Save Thousands of Lives,” published on the daily newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, which is the UK’s most circulated newspaper of record.

“People should eat less meat to reduce climate change and save thousands of lives a year, a Government-funded report has said. It was released as Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, warned that global warming poses a “real and present danger” to the health of millions. The number of animals farmed for food should be cut by almost a third, experts recommended. The move would significantly cut emissions and save around 18,000 lives a year from heart disease alone, they estimate.

Meat production is estimated to be to blame for around 18 per cent of the gases thought to cause man-made global warming. Cutting down production of chicken, beef and pork could save even more lives, scientists said, if deaths from other diseases, such as cancer and diabetes, are included. The move could also save around 200 deaths a year each from dementia and breast cancer.

Mr Burnham said: "Climate change can seem a distant, impersonal threat – in fact the associated costs to health are a very real and present danger.” Margaret Chan, of the World Health Organisation, warned that “no mercy” would be shown for humans’ mistakes over climate change.”

Aside from the health aspects, meat production and consumption raises a multitude of ethical questions. US Professor James E. McWilliams of Texas State University and a fellow in agrarian studies at the prominent Yale University, addresses these issues in his article, “Bellying Up to Environmentalism,” published on November 16, 2009 for The Washington Post, the largest and most established newspaper in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.

“Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, "Hey, that's personal?" Probably not. It's more likely that you'd frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It's a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation. Sure, we've been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc.

But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice. Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.”

With the planet’s survival at stake, it is now ever more pertinent that the message of veg as a viable and sustainable solution to climate change be spread throughout the world’s population. Through the help of mainstream media this message can reach the public at large most effectively, helping to raise awareness for that day when, as with other harmful substances, meat consumption becomes socially unacceptable.

With its capability to reduce greenhouse gases by as much as 80 percent, let us pray all world leaders at the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference seriously regards adopting the sustainable policy of a vegan diet. Our respectful gratitude, all journalists and media for your concerted and noble efforts in promulgating the urgent message to be veg as the key for the salvation of humanity and our shared planet.

Gracious viewers, thank you for your presence for today’s program. Up next is Words of Wisdom right after Noteworthy News here on Supreme Master Television. Blessed be all dedicated hearts in bringing about a sustainable and peaceful world.