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Dr. Michelle Warren, a professor of medicine at New York Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City--and a member of the Council for Women's Nutrition Solutions, which is sponsored by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association--expresses concern about calcium deficiency connected with a vegan diet: "The most serious consequences are low bone mass and osteoporosis. That is a permanent condition." Warren says that in her practice, she has seen young vegetarians with irregular periods and loss of hair. "And there's a peculiar color, a yellow tinge to the skin," that occurs in people who eat a lot of vegetables rich in beta carotene in combination with a low-calorie diet. "I think it's very unattractive." She also is troubled by the reasons some young vegetarians give for their choice of diet. One female patient, Warren says, wouldn't eat meat because she was told it was the reason her father had a heart attack.
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, sees most of the meat and dairy lobby's arguments as desperate, disingenuous scare stories. "It unmasks the industry's self-interest," he says, "when it voices concern about B12 while hundreds of thousands of people are dying prematurely because of too much saturated fat from meat and dairy products." Indeed, according to David Pimentel, a Cornell ecologist, the average American consumes 112 grams of protein a day, twice the amount recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. "This has implications for cancer risks and stress on the urinary system," says Pimentel. "And with this protein comes a lot of fat. Fully 40% of our calories--and heavy cardiovascular risks--come from fat."
Pimentel argues that vegetarianism is much more environment-friendly than diets revolving around meat. "In terms of caloric content, the grain consumed by American livestock could feed 800 million people--and, if exported, would boost the U.S. trade balance by $80 billion a year." Grain-fed livestock consume 100,000 liters of water for every kilogram of food they produce, compared with 2,000 liters for soybeans. Animal protein also demands tremendous expenditures of fossil-fuel energy--eight times as much as for a comparable amount of plant protein. Put another way, says Pimentel, the average omnivore diet burns the equivalent of a gallon of gas per day--twice what it takes to produce a vegan diet. And the U.S. livestock population--cattle, chickens, turkeys, lambs, pigs and the rest--consumes five times as much grain as the U.S. human population. But then there are 7 billion of them; they outnumber us 25 to 1.