Endorsements of Vegetarian Diets

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”          
          – Albert Einstein, p. 85 of The Food Revolution, Robbins

“If you step back and look at the data (on beef and cancer), the optimum amount of red meat you eat should be zero.”
          - Walter Willett, M.D., Chairman of the Nutrition Department, Harvard School of Public Health and Director of a study of 88,000 American nurses that analyzed the link between diet and colon cancer

It is the position of the American Dietetic Association and Dieticians of Canada that appropriately planned vegetarian diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.
--- Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets
          Journal of American Dietetic Association, 2003.50142

”A low-fat plant-based diet would not only lower the heart attack rate about 85% but would lower the cancer rate 60%.”
          -- William Castelli, M.D., Director Framingham Health Study National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

”Both breast cancer and colon cancer have been generally associated with the level of consumption of animal fat.”
          -- Arthur Upton, Director, National Cancer Institute, Oct. 1979

World Hunger

Much of the world's massive hunger problems could be solved by the reduction or elimination of meat-eating.
The reasons:

1. livestock pasture needs cut drastically into land which could otherwise be used to grow food;
2. vast quantities of food which could feed humans is fed to livestock raised to produce meat.

• This year alone, twenty million people worldwide will die as a result of malnutrition.
  
• One child dies of malnutrition every 2.3 seconds.
  
• One hundred million people could be adequately fed using the land freed if Americans reduced their intake of meat by a mere 10%.

              --from Pulitzer Prize nominee John Robbins' book, Diet for a New America.

“There are any number of studies that show that consuming more of these plant-based foods reduces the risk for a long list of chronic maladies (including coronary artery disease, obesity, diabetes and many cancers) and is a probable factor in increased longevity in the industrialized world.”
          -- Time Magazine, “Should You Be a Vegetarian?”, July 2002 Issue

“Virtually everywhere we look, the picture is the same,” says Dr. Colin Campbell, Biochemist at Cornell University. “The fewer foods of animal origin people eat -- and the more plant-based foods -- the lower their risk of many of the big diseases that plague us here.”

Here’s the clincher. According to Campbell’s data, adding even small amount of meat or other animal products to an otherwise vegetarian diet begins to raise blood cholesterol levels -- and with them the risk of heart disease. In other words, as he stated in an issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, “your health prospects are best when the meat and dairy in your diet are down around zero.”

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. former Senior Science Advisor to American Institute for Cancer Research; Director, Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition, Health and Environment, 1983-1990 - from Health Magazine, May/June, 1996, pages 84-86

A considerable body of scientific data suggests positive relationships between vegetarian life-styles and risk reduction for several chronic degenerative diseases and conditions, such as obesity, coronary artery disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, colon cancer, and others.          -- Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian Diets

The PYRAMID builders at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have now made it official. This year, for the very first time, the agency’s published dietary guidelines explicitly acknowledged that a vegetarian diet - one with no meat at all - can fill any American’s nutrient needs.       --from Health Magazine, May/June, 1996, pages 84-86