As many of you know, I eat a whole-foods plant based diet. This means all my calories and nutrition comes from plants, and while I am definitely not perfect, I try to ensure that the majority of my food is unprocessed, whole foods. In her book, Gut and Psychology Syndrome: Natural Treatment for Autism, ADHD/ADD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Depression and Schizophrenia, Dr. Campbell McBride asserts that veganism is both unsustainable for human beings, AND that veganism is unsustainable for our planet. The first claim is very easy for me to debunk. Simply put, I've been eating this way for 11 years, more than 1/3rd of my life. I have no major health problems (even though I did prior to changing to a whole-foods plant based diet), and I am in great shape. For me, assertions by Campbell McBride in her book, such as, "The fact is, humans can live without plants! However, we cannot live without animal foods" are obviously tough for me to digest, since I am a living contradiction to what she is claiming, and there are tens of thousands of other individuals and studies (here are just a few) that contradict her as well. (and I mean come on! Humans can live without plants!? Seriously doc!?). While I could write a novel exclusively on why her claims about veganism and your health are so contradictory to reality, that isn't my primary focus. If you want to read another blog dedicated to that, let me recommend one titled "Finding my Kid" or you could simply read one of the many, MANY books or research documents on the subject. My favorite: The China Study.
My focus is to address her assertions that vegan living isn't sustainable for our environment. She even claims that the reason there are so many studies and articles stating that vegan lifestyles are so positive for our environment is because "This propaganda for vegetarianism has likely been launched by the agrochemical industry, which can increase their profits dramatically if large populations of people turn vegetarian." This statement blows my mind! There are plenty of resources out there to support that it takes significantly more agriculture to raise meat than it does to raise plants for human consumption. In fact, it takes 3 years and 24 pounds of food a day, to raise a cow to maturity to where it can be butchered. That's a total of around 26,280 pounds of plants. The average vegan eats around 5 pounds of plants a day. This means that you could take the same amount of food you just grew to feed one cow to the point where it can be food, and feed someone for 15 years! Alternately, you could feed 5656 people for one day! In 2018, the average American ate.6 pounds of meat a day, or about 650 calories. Taking that average into account, one average cow can feed 750 people in a day (as long as those people got the other 1350 calories needed from PLANTS!). In other words, you can feed 4906 more people per day having your plants go straight from farm to table, than you can if it makes a stop inside a cow first. Why in the world would the agrochemical industry EVER want people to stop eating meat? Their profits would absolutely plummet if there were no animals to feed with their crops.
Here's where things really get interesting. Campbell McBride's counterargument to this is that animal farming should only be exclusively pasture-raised: "All [animals] need is natural, chemical-free pasture with plenty of growing herbs. They will convert the plant matter into meat and milk for us. And the grass grows for free!" We have all seen the happy looking cow, grazing carelessly in a pasture as we stroll through some part of rural America. Seems so serene, but is it sustainable? I took a deep dive into this topic, and found some very startling results.
-Before I reveal them, just a quick disclaimer. I am not a scientist, and all these numbers are based on empirical averages that I used to make calculations, these numbers are averages linked together, NOT actual scientific studies. These numbers are extremely rudimentary, nevertheless, I believe they are very eye-opening.-
In order to feed all 7.6 billion people on this Earth the way Campbell McBride would want them to eat, we would have to produce at least 17 MILLION cows a day. This is based on us getting 1,100 calories from meat each day, still only half our daily caloric consumption. In order to raise a cow on an open pasture like Campbell McBride recommends, it needs approximately 2 acres of grassland per cow. Plug in some simple math, and here's what we come up with:
--In order for her ideals to work, we would need to be able to kill 6.2 BILLION cows a year. All 6.2 billion cows slaughtered would be on average, three years old, which means there would need to be 18.6 billion cows on the earth, grazing, at any given time.
--Each of these 18.6 billion cows would need 2 acres of grassland in order to get enough plants to survive, meaning there would have to be 37.2 billion acres of pasture land on Earth to feed our animals.
Big reveal: Scientists estimate there are about 4.9 billion hectares, or about 10 billion acres of land available to be cultivated or used for pastures on Earth.
This means, that even if we were to grow enough cows to produce HALF our caloric intake on pasture land, we would be 27 BILLION acres of land short on this planet in order to do it.
Compare that to sustainable plant agriculture, where you can grow more than 10,000 pounds of food per year per acre. In order feed 7.6 billion people 5 pounds of plants a day, you would need 30 billion pounds of plants a day, and 11 trillion pounds of plants a year. Sounds daunting, except that since you can grow 10,000 pounds of food per year per acre, the amount of land you would need to do this is 1.3 billion acres, giving our planet a surplus of 8.7 billion unused acres of farmable land.
The swing from plant growing to pasture animal raising is over 35 billion acres, and over 150 trillion pounds of plant-food.
Below is a spreadsheet to illustrate these numbers, for excel geeks like myself. All these numbers were averages found on various credible sites, multiplied by the respective factors:
Again, I'm aware that these are VERY rudimentary numbers, and I don't claim to be a scientist at all, but it seems pretty darn clear, based on some stats that are easy to piece together, that Campbell McBride's claim that pasture-raised animals is more environmentally sustainable than plant production is simply untrue.
By the way, I approached this topic from a totally unfeeling standpoint, treating cows as simple produce rather than sentient beings that would rather not end up on your plate if they were given a choice.
The above table shows that we would have to murder 6 billion sentient beings a year, practically the equivalent of the entire human race. Seems a bit genocidal in my more emotional opinion.
To conclude, I want to reiterate that this post is in no way attacking Campbell McBride's claims regarding the efficacy of her diet on healing diseases, although I couldn't find any studies or scientific evidence to support her theories. Regardless, I haven't spent the allotted time researching that aspect, so it will have to be tackled another time. My only purpose in writing this post is to illustrate that her claim that "humans don't need plants" is complete nonsense, and her claim that pasture-raised animal farming is more environmentally friendly and sustainable than plant agriculture is impossibly untrue.
