Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
known carcinogen in the world is probably a man-made indus-
trial toxin called dioxin. When you hear something referred to as
toxic waste on the news, they're probably talking about dioxins.
Through food alone, nonvegan Americans are getting up to twenty
times the maximum allowable daily dioxin exposure set by the EPA.
Putting aside the dioxins present in cigarette smoke, the number-
one source of dioxin exposure for Americans is via the diet, in
chickens and eggs, fish, dairy, and other animal products. Nursing
infants with nonvegan mothers can get more than sixty times the
maximum tolerable dose of dioxins! Breast is still best, even when
mothers expose their babies to these levels of toxins, but vegan
breast milk is better.
In 2003, the most prestigious scientific body in the country, the
National Academy of Sciences, released a damning report on the
amount of dioxins in the U.S. food supply. Its number-one recom-
mendation was for our kids to reduce their consumption of all fatty
animal foods. This is because dioxins are stored in animal fat, and
U.S. omnivores are getting more than twenty times the tolerable
daily dose in their diet. Twenty. In the United States, millions of
tons of fat are scraped from the carcasses of farmed animals and
put straight back into animal feed. We've turned natural herbi-
vores like cows into meat-eaters and have made them, along with
pigs, chickens, and other animals, into cannibals as well. Fat trim-
mings from those animal carcasses get fed to other animals, and
the dioxin levels get higher and higher.
In 1997, researchers at the University of New York Health Sci-
ences Center published a study measuring the levels of industrial
pollutants in fast food. They sent to the lab McDonald's Big Macs,
slices of Pizza Hut cheese pizza, KFC's Original Recipe chicken, and
scoops of Häagen Dazs ice cream thrown in for dessert. They found
quite a toxic soup: PCBs, dioxins, and even pesticides like DDT, a
pesticide considered so toxic it was banned decades ago.
