The cost of eating meat

If you could help prevent future drastic climate changes and natural disasters, would you? If you could limit the time you spend in the emergency waiting rooms and doctors offices, would you? If you could save 219,000 gallons of water per year, would you?

Would you change your diet?

If you want to make a change to be a part of something that could save our planet, cut back on – or say goodbye – to meat.

Without the earth, we can not exist.

Without our health, we would not be alive.

We need to be cautious with what we put into our bodies and how we treat our planet. Society already has a “sin tax” on harmful things like alcohol and cigarettes which kill ourselves and the earth. Why then do we overlook animal production and the amount of meat we consume on a daily basis.

Organizations from the Mayo clinic to PETA have found that by adopting a vegan or vegetarian diet decreases the risk of heart disease. It lowers cholesterol levels as well as blood pressure. It also reduces rates of getting hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Not only does it prevent many health issues, adopting a meatless diet has shown to lower cancer rates.

If personal health isn’t important, what about the health of the planet?

Animal agriculture causes as much as 51 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. One cow can drink more than 50 gallons of water per day while farmers use another 683 gallons of water to produce just one gallon of milk and another 2,400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. Fossil fuel emissions from agriculture are a large contributor to greenhouse gasses.

In a study done by the Wageningen University and Research Centre, they found that 80 per cent of deforestation is caused by the clearing of our forests to create pastures for animal production and cash crops for factory farms.

Animal production using immense amounts of water that could be helping countries going through droughts or nations who are getting their water from a polluted source.

It’s also the number-one cause of water pollution in our world, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

If a “sin tax” is implemented on things we see as harmful then without doubt meat should not be overlooked.

By implementing a “sin tax” on meat, it would help reduce the high consumption of meat and help decrease the environmental issues our world is struggling to prevent and control.

Revenue from taxing meat products could be spent educating people on the environment or pay for the rising health care costs of unhealthy diets.

We need to start looking at our future and stop treating our world like it will be here forever. We are destroying our planet and our health. A tax on meat could put us in the right direction to repair some of the damage we have caused to our world.

It’s time to say goodbye to the meat sweats and hello to a strong, healthy, meat-free you this 2018.