Our population is in the throes of an epidemic of obesity and the attendant scourges of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases that each year cripple, then kill 1.5 million Americans. These conditions have been linked conclusively with consumption of meat and other animal products by dozens of reviews of hundreds of original medical studies involving tens of thousands of individual cases.

A diet containing meat and other animal products is laden with saturated fat, cholesterol, hormones, antibiotics, pathogens, and salt. Such a diet flouts the U.S. Dietary Guidelines and is particularly damaging to children who are still growing and whose early dietary habits become lifelong addictions.