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The World Health Organization report in November 2015 ranked processed meat ranked as a group 1 carcinogen (the same category as cigarettes, alcohol and asbestos). Eating just 50g per day (two rashers of bacon) increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18%. It also classified red meat as a group 2A carcinogen. Scientists at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tested supermarket chickens’ flesh and found that 96 percent of Tyson chicken packages were contaminated with campylobacter, a dangerous bacterium that causes 2.4 million cases of food poisoning each year, resulting in diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain, and fever. Around 51 percent (depending on the calculation and source) of man-made pollution comes from the meat industry, putting factory farming ahead of transportation in contributing to the greenhouse effect. What’s more, it takes about 40 calories of fossil-fuel energy to create every one calorie of feed-lot beef in the U.S. (compared to 2.2 calories of energy needed to create plant proteins). |