A plant-based diet can reduce your risk of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and some cancers. The latest FDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans call for less meat, more fruits, vegetables and whole grains.

'Eating fewer animal products has enormous benefits for the health of your blood vessels. The deterioration and blockage of blood vessels that leads to heart attacks can be reduced 70% by eating the so-called Mediterranean diet, which emphasizes fruits, vegetables and whole grains, along with some fish and minimal meat and dairy products. That amount of reduction is 2-3 times more than the benefit of taking aspirin or taking drugs to lower cholesterol.

A low-fat vegan (no animal products) diet has been shown in a small study to be more effective at controlling blood glucose in people with diabetes than the American Diabetes Association's own diet. The same kind of diet is very helpful for weight loss, in part because of the elimination of calorie-dense meat and dairy products.

Nearly half of the 50 million pounds of antibiotics produced each year in the U.S. are used on farms, primarily as growth promoters. This creates more resistant strains of bacteria, making food borne illnesses like salmonella more resistant to antibiotics.

Food borne organisms such as salmonella, campylobacter, and e coli 0157:H7 originate in farm animals (including eggs) and cause 76 million human illnesses in the US every year (one in four people). Samples taken from retail markets show e coli contamination of 69% of pork and beef products and 92% of poultry products. More than 80% of all those organisms were resistant to antibiotics, probably because of the intense use of antibiotics needed to keep confined crowded animals healthy. Fruit and vegetable crops can also be contaminated by irrigation water and manure used as fertilizer.

Diseases such as Mad Cow Disease and Avian Influenza have become threats to humans because of large-scale farming and food processing practices that promote the incubation and widespread dissemination of infectious agents among animals and to humans.

While there is no definite proof that meat and dairy products cause cancer, there is epidemiological evidence that diets low in animal products may reduce cancer rates by 30-50%. There are many possible molecular mechanisms involving cancer promotion and immune inhibition by which animal products might promote cancer. In the vegan diet the increased of amounts of healthy fats and many known and unknown plant chemicals strengthen cancer defenses.

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