Almost every day we hear a call for us to reduce our consumption of meat and dairy, with the long-term goal for many being the widespread conversion to a totally vegan lifestyle. ´Plant-based´ has become a term so worthy and ubiquitous that many people have forgotten their historic antipathy to an extreme vegan cause.
But what if the statistics driving the plant-based movement were misleading or even false? What if we were being manipulated by a happy coalition of vested interests that includes environmentalists, Big Pharma, Big Food, established dietary advice organisations, and even a little known but rich and powerful religious group with a long-standing commitment to a vegan diet? What if removing animal foods from our diet was a serious threat to human health, and a red herring in the fight against climate change?
In THE GREAT PLANT-BASED CON Jayne Buxton demonstrates that every one of these what-ifs is a real world actuality. Because most of us don´t realise this, we are allowing ourselves to be dragged down a dietary road that will have severe repercussions for our health and wellbeing, and that of our children, and the climate, for decades to come. From statistics that show how a long-term deficiency in B12 can cause neurological damage and rheumatoid arthritis (B12 is only found in animal foods) to an examination of how the growing of ´plant based´ food does not produce the global pollution levels we have been led to believe (85% of global emissions are generated from sources other than animal agriculture), Jayne interrogates and debunks many of the myths that have grown up in recent years and proposes a more balanced way forward.