Other studies say that it can take 500 times more land to make a pound of beef than a pound of vegetables. In a world where a child dies of malnutrition every 3 seconds, this is a tragic way to use our land. Apart from the crucial considerations of health and natural goodness, and respect for animal life, meat eating is both inefficient and wasteful. As protein converters, livestock are inefficient. An acre of cereal will produce five times more protein than an acre devoted to raising animals for human consumption.
Some individual vegetables are yet more efficient.
Land is capable of supplying food for nearly fourteen times as many people when it is used to grow food for people rather than crops to feed livestock. In contrast, it has been estimated that our current yield of plant foods could nourish more than double the world's population, perhaps even turning the world hunger problem around, if meat-consuming societies would curtail their meat demand and free grazing land for the more efficient purpose of growing food crops. A peer-reviewed medical study, in the International Journal of Health Services, suggests that the genetically engineered bovine growth hormone, rBGH, commonly administered to dairy cows to boost milk production, may promote cancer of the breast and colon. In addition to the cancer risk, injecting rBGH reduces a cows life expectancy and increases her risk of disease, leading to increased use of anti-biotic injections, thus leaving residues of these drugs in the milk.