Striking Infos

If we forgo 1 pound of beef, we can save more water than if we stop showering for half a year. Just don’t eat 4 hamburgers and you can shower for half a year every day, generously.

If all the Antarctica were to melt – which is melting now – if  it all melted, then the sea level could rise up to 70 meters!

MEAT kills literally billions. A staggering 55 billion animals, 8 times – 8 times, 8 times – the entire global human population are killed for human consumption each and every year.

This is not even counting the several billion fish that perish, with a total loss that translates to more than 155 million beings killed every day. Humans die, too, each year because of meat and fish, and anything related to animal consumption. Nearly 33 million people succumb to meat-related diseases annually through heart disease, cancer and other conditions that claim the lives of more than 90,000 persons each day. 90,000 persons die each day because of animal consumption!


About 40% of the global grain is going to livestock, and 85% of the world’s protein-rich soy is being force-fed to, force fed cattle and other animals.

If every one ate a plant-based diet, there would be enough food to satisfy 10 billion people, 10 billion people!

One 6-ounce beefsteak costs 16 times as much gasoline, or fossil fuel energy, as one vegan meal.
One cup of broccoli, one cup of eggplant, 4 ounces of cauliflower and eight ounces of rice, to be exact, according to research. Sixteen times—6 ounce beefsteak only, costs 16 times more than that whole vegan meal.

Flood events worldwide are now three times higher than in the 1980s. In 2008, there were 40 category 5 storms, the most ever recorded including in the Atlantic, India and Bangladesh, and in the Philippines. It takes just one category 4 or 5 storm to destroy a major city, just one.

If you can imagine, over 5 billion pounds of pesticides are used throughout the world each year! And only about 10% - 10%! - of these chemicals even reach the areas where they are intended for. So the rest? What happens?

They go into the air and water where they have been linked to everything from cancer of humans and animals to oceanic dead zones.

One animal farm with 5,000 pigs produces the same amount of waste as one whole town of 20,000 people. Imagine that. One dairy cow farm with 2,500 cows produces as much waste as an entire city of 411,000 people.

If there were no subsidies for a hamburger, if the government didn’t give them any subsidies for the meat industry in any case, then a hamburger that some people eat produced by clearing forests in India alone – would cost US$200! Not just 99 cents like the way you buy it in some shop, for example.

You see, it would cost US$200 - the real cost of a hamburger. Now in the US, even before the swine flu impacted the pig farming business, the pig industry has been losing billions of dollars…losing billions of dollars in the pig industry.

Why? Because they cannot afford the grains to feed their livestock due to the high food prices. And the food prices are getting higher and higher nowadays.

So, how do they survive? Your tax money, goes to the government, the government subsidizes them – that’s how they survive. So, it’s a losing business.

The number of oxygen-depleted oceanic dead zones has increased from only 49 in the 1960s to 405 in 2008. And I am sure there are more now

The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest in the world. It is 22,000 square kilometers and was created mainly from agriculture runoff, including food raised for livestock and manure.

Around 212,000 metric tons of fish are estimated to die in the Gulf of Mexico dead zone every year.

The rainforests themselves normally are our protectors, but as the climate gets warmer, instead of absorbing CO2 to protect our planet’s climate, they will be emitting back CO2 as well, and that will be harmful to us.

They will be worsening the global warming problem, because they cannot absorb the CO2, but they will release all the CO2 that is already contained in their kingdom.

NASA reported that once the forest is cleared for pasture or feed crops, the soil itself becomes a large source of emitting carbon – the soil itself even. So not only that, the fires that burn down the trees also release a lot of carbon dioxide, CO2.

For example, 91% of the Amazon deforested since 1970 was used for what? For grazing pasture, meaning that the number one reason for deforestation of the Amazon, which is the greatest lung of our planet, is to raise cattle.

And the second biggest reason, also for cattle. They grow the soy to feed the cattle and of course, other animals as well, by the way, yes.

In fact, we are losing 55 square meters of rainforest for every beef hamburger patty. Every little beef hamburger patty, that costs 55 square meters.

While we are sitting here in safety and comfort, and have sufficient food for ourselves and our family, our neighboring people, our world co-citizens, more than one billion of them, are living in poverty, in hunger, in thirst. No sufficient water, no clean water, no food to eat. Children are dying every few seconds. Statistically, every five seconds one child dies of hunger.

One meat eater requires two hectares – that’s four acres of land – to support him. But that same two hectares, or four acres of land, could support the healthy lifestyle of 80 vegans.

Compare that. Now, let’s look at water. A meat eater uses up 15,000 liters of water per day, because of the meat diet, which is 15 times as much water as a vegan would use.

By the way, at least one-third of all the world’s fish caught and murdered today are fed to livestock – not to us humans even.

One time, an 8-acre large, such pig-manure lagoon burst in North Carolina, spilling 25 million gallons of this poisonous waste, twice the volume of the notorious Exxon-Valdez oil spill.

We complain about oil spills, but this is even worse. Hundreds of millions of fish in the state’s New River were killed instantly due to the nitrates in the waste, with further harmful effects once the contamination reached the ocean.

So, it doesn't even help to try to raise animals organically.  The so-called “sustainable,” “free-range,” organic poultry, for example, needs 20% more energy and has a 20% higher, bigger impact on global warming than non-organic poultry farms. Think about that.

Similarly, organic eggs were found to have a 14% higher carbon footprint than non-organic eggs. And even though you don’t use fertilizers, the benefit could be cancelled out because of the increased land use.

Scientists also worry about the billions of tons of methane sitting beneath the now-melting Arctic permafrost and the ever-warming oceans. Just a fraction released from either one could trigger mass extinctions.

The pork industry in the US has lost US$5.4 billion since 2007. Company after major company is declaring bankruptcy right now, so they’re asking for help from the government, which ended up buying their unwanted pork products from the farmers for US$105 million in 2009, for example. The reasons that the powerful pork industry is struggling are, number one, high costs of feed grains, and number two, the consumers are not buying their products as much anymore since the swine flu outbreak.

Imagine if no one eats meat, no one would ever kill these animals for a living. That would be more powerful than the companies’ lobbying.

A recent study by the United Nations found that plants and animals are now disappearing at up to 1,000 times the natural background rate of extinction, with vital life-supporting ecosystems that could soon be irreversibly damaged.

Even with strict greenhouse gas emission limits, the Earth’s temperature is still expected to rise another 3.5 degrees Celsius within a few decades, which would result in the death of the Amazon rainforest, massive hurricanes smashing coastal cities, vast runaway release of methane from melting permafrost, and ultimately, mass extinction.


I’m sure you are already aware that the Middle East contains 13, 13, one-three, of the 19, one-nine, driest countries on the globe. Now, you see? The water available per person in the past 50 years has become 62% less. Meaning in the past, before 50 years, for example, if they have 100 liters per day, now they have only 38 liters, per person.

Seventy percent of all water used by humans goes to agriculture – especially livestock agriculture, livestock raising.

Also, animal raising is the top cause of water pollution worldwide. You know that. In the US alone, livestock produces 130 times the excrement of the whole US human population, 130 times more than the whole US population, yes! That is 87,000 pounds generated per second! These excrement, this polluted waste, however,
is not really treated at all, despite the fact that animal waste contains about 160 times the bacteria and pollutants more than human sewage even.