To Be or Not to Be... Vegetarian? I say veggo is the way to go!

The first set of reasons listed deal with the amount of food that can be produced by eliminating the meat industry. These arguments are intended to show that a vegetarian lifestyle adopted by everyone would save a large number of people. The last reason listed is "1,000,000,000 people in the west gorging on meat & dairy leave 1,000,000,000 to waste away & 3,500,000,000 teeter on the brink." But now it is time to escape this tunnel vision and look at other aspects. First and foremost, there are already over 6.7 billion people on this planet. If the human population on the planet is out of whack, then it is clearly the result of TOO MANY people. Now you want everyone to take up a vegetarian diet to add MORE people to this planet? If those one billion people didn't waste away, we would have close to eight billion people on the planet. Perhaps you are under the impression that saving everyone is a good thing, but nothing could be further from the truth. People need to die. If we use flex.com's suggestions, humans would soon become overpopulated. In biology, every population has a limit known as the carrying capacity (symbolized by the letter k). Once this limit is reached, a rapid decline in the population occurs (i.e. mass death). So in the end, flex.com's method would kill many more people than the ones that currently starve. Moving on to the section on land, it is true that a lot of land is cleared for farming. But the world in which we live is very opportunistic when it comes to land. Eliminating meat industries will not give that land back to nature. It would simply be used for a factory, real estate, or some other business venture. In the section on air, there is much talk of the methane produced by cattle. I still have yet to hear why the methane from cattle is different from that of other animals. Furthermore, methane has always been around, long before global warming. If global warming is in fact true, I doubt that the key culprit will turn out to be cow farts. And reasons such as "Fertilizer, weedkiller & pesticides sprayed on crops enter the atmosphere creating a noxious carcinogenic cocktail" have nothing to do with the meat industry. The section on water seems to talk a great deal about wasting water. But in reality, water constantly cycles and is usually redistributed properly through nature (droughts and dry spells are not a constant occurrence). There is also mention of the waste that ends up in rivers and such through the meat industry. But such things occur in nature constantly, and singling out the waste in rivers from meat industries makes no sense. Furthermore, are sentences such as "The water used to produce a 1000 lb beef steer is enough to float a Destroyer battleship" really supporting vegetarianism? It seems more like a fun fact to me. The section on efficiency speaks of wasting energy for meat production (which cannot actually occur due to the law of conservation of energy). It also mentions crops that are wasted by feeding them to animals. But if this were actually the case, if the crops fed to animals really wasted too much, then why oh why does the government still pay farmers to burn excess crops? If the crops are still produced with so much surplus that farmers must burn them in order to maintain supply and demand, then feeding crops to the animals cannot be anywhere near as wasteful as you or the website claim. Moving on to the section on animals, I will not deny that there are many cruel practices listed here. But why these practices lead to the conclusion that one must become a vegetarian is beyond me. It would seem to make just as much sense to by organic meats that do not use such practices, or to eat meat without an industry such as venison. The section on health starts off with a correlation, which does not show any type of causation. Vegetarians may be shown to live longer, but there is no evidence that this is caused by their diet. There are many correlations that can be found where one factor is not dependent on the other. For example, there is a real correlation between the amount of babies crying and the amount of ice cream consumed by people on any given day. Does the sound of babies crying make people want to eat ice cream? Does the act of eating ice cream cause babies to cry? The answer to both of these questions is obviously no. There is an external factor (in this case, heat) and that doesn't make the correlation less real. So a vegetarian living longer shows nothing. And the addendum "and they don't get sick as often" is something for which I would like to see evidence. I have never known a vegetarian that was healthy or less sick than others. If anything, the case was the opposite. Other things mentioned in the health section once again do not account for organic meat. The antibiotics, hormones, toxins, and pesticides would not be present in organic meat. Many of the other reasons are also correlational. Other reasons listed deal with nutrition. But nutritionists are not scientists. They use correlations to show causation, they do not use the same terms as everyone else in the science world, and most importantly their claims are non-falsifiable. I have already shown that correlations do not show causation. Let's now look at the calorie (something nutritionists speak of often). A calorie is a unit of heat energy equivalent to 4.184 joules. One thousand such units, or 4,184 joules is known to the rest of the scientific community as a kilocalorie. But not the nutritionists. They have decided to call the kilocalorie a calorie, and therefore cannot communicate with other sciences in scientific jargon since they have assigned their own meanings to terms. The next point is key: if something cannot be falsified it is not science. A nutritionist may claim that some type of diet will cause people to live longer while another causes early death. Yet when they are shown a person that lived to 95 on a diet that supposedly causes early death, they do not admit defeat. Rather, they make some stupid claim such as "Well, if he was on a healthy diet he probably would've lived to 110" or some other such nonsense. So I cannot take nutritionists seriously, and that is the majority of the health section. Nevertheless, even using nutrition as an argument fails when one studies physiology. In truth, a vegetarian or vegan diet is not healthy. The amount of iron that vegetarians receive is much lower than that of meat-eaters. Iron is needed to bind to hemoglobin and carry oxygen throughout the body. In fact, there have been cases where a vegetarian diet has led to anemia because of the lack of iron. The site seems to come down on dairy as well, so I assume that it is promoting a vegan diet. With this comes a further problem. Vitamin B12 (aka cobalamin) can only be found in animal products. It is necessary for two reasons: it works in conjunction with folic acid to create red blood cells and it is essential to the production of myelin which coats the axons of neurons. So health is not achieved by vegetarians or vegans. It is achieved with a well-balanced diet. There is nothing wrong with following one's nature. Humans are natural omnivores. Eating that which we are meant to eat by nature is the way to go.