MANY great things happen when we start eating better!
When you begin moving up the 4Leaf scale with your food choices, you’ll be greatly improving far more than you ever imagined. Improving your health, of course, is extremely important, but it’s just the beginning.
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As you begin to replace many of your meat, dairy, egg, fish, and highly-processed calories with healthier, plant-based alternatives, you’re about to be a part of the biggest Win-Win-Win in the history of humanity:
- For your own health
- For the health of our ecosystem that sustains us
- For the future of our civilization and longterm viability of the human species
In addition to the plethora of personal health benefits associated with better food choices, here is my TOP TEN list of other great things you’re doing for our world:
Over 70% of the cost of healthcare in the USA is driven by our food choices.
1. Cost of HealthCare. Standing at over $3 trillion in just the USA, this economic nightmare is beginning to threaten our entire way of life in the developed world- where most of the unhealthy foods are eaten. When enough humans begin eating at the 3Leaf and 4Leaf level, that $3.2 trillion number can be cut by some two trillion dollars. In the long-run, that helps everyone.
2. World Hunger. In a nutshell, there’s simply not enough land and water to feed everyone the Standard American Diet (SAD) or the Typical Western Diet (TWD). That’s because, on average, the production of animal-based foods requires over ten times as much land, water, and energy than the same number of healthier, plant-based calories. We’d need over two planet Earths to feed everyone, but we only have one.
This planetary emergency has already begun.
3. Water Scarcity. This is our most URGENT problem and there’s no viable way to solve it without radically changing our food choices in the next decade. Underground aquifers involved with feeding half the world’s population are being depleted rapidly, which will bring us to an unprecedented planetary emergency in the next five to ten years. Without water, we die in just a few days.
4. Soil Erosion & Deforestation. We are losing an area of arable farmland about the size of South Carolina each year because of erosion that is primarily due to our growing massive amounts of feed for those innocent 100 billion animals that we eat for dinner each year. Land is a finite resource and we’re depleting it rapidly. What are we doing now when we run out of land? We’re burning down rainforest in the Amazon so that we can have land to grow soybeans that are shipped to China to feed pigs. China now consumes TWICE as much meat as the USA and their numbers are still going up rapidly. Since 1970, we’ve destroyed some 30 million acres of rainforest a year, mostly for the raising of livestock.
5. Species extinction. Due to the above, we’re destroying the natural habitats of hundreds of thousands of species. Every species in nature has a purpose and plays a role in the overall ecosystem that sustains humans and all the other species. And, now, because of human activity (primarily the raising of livestock), the rate of species extinction is running at over 1,000 times the normal rate in nature.
6. Dependence on fossil fuels. Widely thought to be the leading cause of climate change, our global consumption has gone up every year since 1950 despite all of the solar panels, electric cars, and windmills you see. Although the experts aren’t talking much about it, the most powerful way to actually start using less fossil fuel in the future is to replace most of our animal-based calories with healthier, plant-based alternatives.
7. Climate Change. This is the elephant in the room and it exacerbates all of the other problems we have. The bottom line here is that even the largest environmental groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club are simply NOT talking about the leading cause of climate change: the raising of livestock for our dinner tables. Even though reducing our meat & dairy consumption is the only viable way to curb climate change, they don’t talk about it because being identified as “anti-meat” would hurt their fundraising.
Living in harmony with nature
8. Sustainability of our civilization. If the many trends above are not reversed in the next ten years, many experts (Stephen Emmott, Lester Brown and others) agree that our civilization will ultimately collapse well before the end of this century. We simply must learn to live in harmony with nature. Our future depends on it.
9. Sustainability of our Species. Who could not be concerned about this one? By definition, it has to be the most important issue in the 200,000-year history of humanity.
Again, the ONLY viable pathway to the longterm sustainability of our species is the rapid global move in the direction of a plant-based diet for humans. But it’s not happening. For every American or European moving away from meat & dairy, there are 100 people in the developing world moving in the other direction.
“When we eat the way that promotes the best health for ourselves, we also promote the best health for the planet.” T. Colin Campbell, PhD.
10. Suffering Animals. On top of all of the above, what we’re doing to the animals is unconscionable. Counting fish, trillions of animals live a horrible life and suffer an awful death in this world so that we may eat their flesh. The number continues to rise as more people in the developing world begin eating meat, dairy, eggs, and fish (MDEF) for the first time.
Are we in a hopeless situation? Not if we launch a massive global effort to influence billions of people throughout the world to simply begin changing what they eat.
Eating a lot more plants and a lot less meat, dairy, eggs, and fish will buy us enough time to work on larger problems that threaten our future: overpopulation, overconsumption, and our dependence on fossil fuels. The good news is that changing what we eat is the easiest, quickest, and most powerful step we can take.
Each of us CAN make a difference!
CAUTION. Eating the 4Leaf way may quickly decrease your need for medications. You should tell your physician what you’re doing. If he/she is unfamiliar with or skeptical of this eating-style, please direct him or her to nutritionstudies.org and plantrician.org.
J. Morris Hicks, CEO, 4Leaf Global, LLC
(board member from 2012 to 2018 of the TCC Center for Nutrition Studies)
4Leaf Global, LLC 