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Good evening, what if I told you that we can change the world through our food choices?
Dr. Joanne Kong explores the health, environmental, and compassionate benefits of adopting a plant-based diet.
Key Takeaways
- Adopting a plant-based diet improves personal health and reduces risks of major diseases.
- Animal agriculture is a primary driver of environmental degradation and climate change.
- Compassion for animals should extend beyond pets to all sentient beings raised for food.
- Individual dietary choices can significantly impact global sustainability and animal welfare.
- Awareness and education are crucial to overcoming cultural habits and making informed food choices.
Summary
- Plant-based eating can transform health, environment, and compassion within 12 minutes of awareness.
- Animal agriculture is a leading cause of environmental damage, including greenhouse gas emissions and resource depletion.
- Meat consumption is linked to major health issues like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity, with high associated costs.
- Plant-based diets provide essential nutrients, fiber, antioxidants, and phytochemicals that support longevity and disease prevention.
- Major health organizations endorse vegetarian diets for their benefits in reducing chronic diseases and improving life expectancy.
- Animal agriculture contributes to climate change, deforestation, water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
- Switching to a plant-based diet can halve an individual's carbon footprint and help mitigate global environmental crises.
- Factory farming causes immense animal suffering, with animals like pigs being highly intelligent and emotional beings.
- There is a moral inconsistency in loving pets while consuming animals raised in factory farms.
- Cultural habits and lack of awareness often prevent people from questioning meat consumption, but change is possible.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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I challenge you in the next 12 minutes to open your minds and your hearts to the power of plant-based eating and the fact that animal agriculture, the raising of animals for food, has grown to become one of the most damaging industries on our planet.
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But I want to make clear that my intent is not to be judgmental, but instead to increase your awareness and give you important information which you may not know.
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Going greener with your diet could be one of the most powerful and transformative decisions you ever make in your life.
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For three significant reasons.
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It has tremendous benefits for your health.
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It's critical to the sustainability of our planet.
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And it will widen your circle of compassion.
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Health.
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We've all heard the saying, you are what you eat.
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The number one cause of death in our country?
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You guessed it.
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It's our diet.
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Our standard American diet, also known as SAD, has put our country at the top of the list in the world for obesity.
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Which increases the risk for serious health problems.
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Overwhelming scientific evidence links the consumption of meat and meat products to numerous diseases.
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Health costs related to meat consumption in our country have skyrocketed to a staggering 50 billion dollars every single year.
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And the World Health Organization now places red and processed meat at the same danger level as cigarettes and asbestos.
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Meat is the new tobacco.
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And this was last November's issue of Time Magazine.
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More and more studies over just the past few years are contributing to the public's growing awareness.
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That we need to become more critically aware of how meat can be harmful to our health.
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So you may ask, why are plant-based vegetarian and vegan diets the healthier choice?
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There are so many reasons.
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A wide range of nutrients, beneficial fiber found only in plant foods, antioxidants, and hundreds of thousands of phytochemicals that protect the body and support good health.
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Overall, vegetarians have a longer life expectancy.
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And substantially lower rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, cancer, obesity, osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and the list goes on.
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But don't just take my word for it.
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Support for vegetarian diets comes from numerous organizations, including the American Cancer Society, American College of Cardiology.
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The Mayo Clinic, Harvard School of Public Health, and the National Institutes of Health, which says.
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Vegetarians may be missing out on grilled hamburgers at picnics.
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But they also tend to miss out on the major health problems that plague many Americans.
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Just take a look at the difference in heart disease, the number one killer of Americans, between those who eat meat and those who are vegetarian and vegan.
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And the progression of many diseases not only can be halted, but reversed, sometimes in as little as just two to three weeks by switching to a plant-based diet.
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Reducing and eliminating the consumption of meat and meat products with a greener diet rich in fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and whole grains will lead to a healthier world.
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The Earth.
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It's not only the health of our bodies that's at stake.
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It's the health of our planet.
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This is what we're facing now at critical levels.
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Climate change and global warming, deforestation, depletion of our resources, soil erosion, species and habitat loss, ocean dead zones, water and air pollution, and world hunger.
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These are not things we can put off dealing with.
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We must now urgently reverse imminent catastrophic environmental damage.
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Certainly, environmentalists and legislators are rightly focusing on reducing carbon emissions.
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And they're investing in alternative and renewable energy sources.
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But all of this would take decades to implement, be enormously expensive in the tens of trillions of dollars.
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And there's the complexity of social, economic, and political issues which must be dealt with at a global scale.
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Because of this, you need to know there is one thing that is a major cause of all of these global problems.
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And that is animal agriculture.
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Here are just a few facts.
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Animal agriculture accounts for 51% of greenhouse gas emissions.
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It's also the number one cause of species and habitat loss due to deforestation for grazing and growing of feed crops.
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In our country, it's the main cause of water pollution.
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It uses half of our water, 70% of our grain, and 80% of our agricultural land is used to feed the 10 billion land animals that are killed every year for food.
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By contrast, you can cut your carbon footprint in half by going vegetarian.
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The Stanford Environmental Law Journal states that our reliance on animal products is a leading cause of everything.
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The one industry that is destroying our planet.
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And the United Nations Environment Program strongly states that a substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change away from animal products.
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While policy leaders and even environmentalists are largely overlooking this issue, there is something you can do right now.
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The single most powerful action you can take to help save our environment and resources is to shift to a plant-based diet.
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Compassion.
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I'm going to tell you the story of an animal in a factory farm.
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Worldwide, every year, 56 billion land animals and 90 billion marine animals are killed for food.
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But I'm not going to show you any graphic images or videos.
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You can easily find these on the internet.
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Instead, I want you to imagine and visualize in your mind what I have to say.
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This is the story of a sow.
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My entire life, I'm kept in a metal gestation crate in half darkness on a grated concrete floor.
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I can't even turn around.
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Confined and unable to engage in any of my natural behaviors, I suffer depression, frustration, and neurotic behaviors.
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Sometimes screaming and biting at the bars that surround me.
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My limbs are swollen, I have open wounds.
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And I'm lying in my own excrement.
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After giving birth from being forcibly impregnated, my babies are taken away from me.
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And I'm slaughtered at the age of only three to five years old.
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We pigs, like the other animals in factory farms, are supposed to be stunned into unconsciousness before being killed.
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But many of us are still alive as we are hoisted upside down, our throats slit.
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And we are lowered into boiling water to remove our hair.
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But did you know I have a sense of self just like you?
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I'm more intelligent than a dog or a cat and even a three-year-old child.
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I'm a highly social creature, intuitive and emotional, just like you.
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I have memories and I can recognize myself in a mirror, just like you.
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And I love to play, even computer games, just like you.
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I care for my young with a bond that's as strong as any human mother.
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Even singing to my babies during nursing.
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I am not something.
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I am someone.
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I am not pork, I am not bacon.
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I am a living, feeling being.
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Just like you.
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So, how many of you have pets?
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There must be a lot of you that have pets.
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And how many of you love your pets as family members?
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I know I do.
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We all have an innate compassion for animals.
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I challenge you to realize and put at the front of your awareness that every animal in a factory farm, like the pig I just described, is just as individual a living being as any of your pets.
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All animals have the will to live, the capacity to suffer, and are equally capable of receiving our love.
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We may therefore ask ourselves the question.
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Why love one but eat the other?
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Our choices regarding animals and diet are shaped by perception, the fact that we see different animals in different ways.
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And there are a number of reasons for this.
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Habit and culture for one.
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Initially, most of us didn't make the choice to eat meat.
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It was a given, right?
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We continued the habit almost mindlessly, accepting it as normal.
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I ate meat for half of my life.
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And when I was growing up, I never even gave it a thought.
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I never questioned it.
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It wasn't until I was well into my college years that I decided to become vegetarian.
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Another reason has to do with a coping process that psychologists call psychic numbing.
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Pertaining in this case to loss of life on a massive scale.
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Even though at some level, we are aware that animals are being slaughtered for food.
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We avoid the emotional pain of empathizing with them as individuals.
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It's really like a kind of denial where we disconnect ourselves from the experience.
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This is what a slaughterhouse worker says.
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I don't think of farmed animals as individuals.
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I wouldn't be able to do my job if I got that personal with them.
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We simply don't see the face on the plate.
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Instead, it's generic food or meat.
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And marketing.
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Look at these products from the grocery store shelf, how do these images of happy animals and pleasant surroundings distance us from the animal's suffering?
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We also accept the eating of meat because what goes on behind the scenes of meat production is largely invisible.
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It's difficult for the public to find the locations and addresses of factory farms.
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Even though, does anyone want to venture a guess how many factory farms there are in this country?
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There are 20,000 of them.
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20,000.
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In our country, 317 animals are killed every single second.
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But for these factory farms, their only goals are efficiency and profit.
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The animals are seen only as units of production.
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So I ask, the next time you're in the dining hall, dare to be aware of the animal that was killed to become someone's meal.
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Going greener with your diet.
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It's not about giving anything up.
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It's not about becoming a different person.
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It is about embracing something that's already inside of you.
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Your innate sense of empathy, kindness, and compassion.
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And you won't be alone.
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Plant-based eating has been identified as one of the top global trends of 2016.
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The power of plant-based eating is the far-reaching and deep impact it can have upon the direction of the world.
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It's up to you and you can make a difference.
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Thank you.
Topics:plant-based dietanimal agriculturehealth benefitsenvironmental impactclimate changeanimal welfaresustainabilityvegetarianveganfactory farming
