Would It Make A Difference To Be Vegan For A Day?

It is hard not to see how vegan food options are becoming more and more common. When steakhouses have vegan options, it’s no longer just a passing phase. But even more than this, convenience restaurants are offering kale salads, vegan friendly foods are filling grocery store shelves and pushing out other staples, and even vegan food trucks are booming. As a doctor, I’ve witnessed firsthand the positive effects of a vegan diet on the body (whether someone decided to drop everything and go vegan or whether they chose to test the waters for a bit to see if they liked it).

Consider Just The Environmental Impact.

It seems a little difficult to take just a single day of someone going on a vegan diet and determining how it might have impacted the environment (or their own health for that matter). Some of my patients have tried going vegan and have said that within a week, they felt better and had a higher self-esteem about their looks as well. But in terms of the environment, my friend Kathy Freston compiled helpful data regarding what he environmental impact could be if everyone in the country went vegetarian for a single day. Vegan diets would be even more beneficial than vegetarian, and this country could save dramatically over just one day as seen here:

• 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost four months
• 1.5 billion pounds of crops that would otherwise be fed to livestock — enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year
• 70 million gallons of gas, enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare
• 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware
• 33 tons of antibiotics
• 1.2 million tons of CO2, or the same amount produced by all of France
• 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages
• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement, which would eliminate almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant

Everyone Means Everyone (Yes, Even You!).

Consider that just one person eating a vegan diet for a month could have a huge impact on the entire country. For starters, one person can be responsible for an average death toll of 33 animals in just a month’s time. Over thirty thousand gallons of water is used every month to supply the needs of one individual meat eater, even forests would need less destruction, saving 900 feet of forest per month per person. Just think about the 1200 pounds of grain used to feed the animals that could also go to starving citizens. With numbers like this, over just one month, it is very easy to see the environmental and economical effects of choosing a vegan diet.