Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [49]
In the mid-1990s, Vegetarian Times magazine set out to determine the cost of being a vegetarian. Two friends—one vegetarian and one not—agreed to go shopping for a week’s worth of groceries to feed their respective families of four. They shopped at the same store and made similar purchases, although the vegetarian bought soy sausages and black beans instead of chicken cutlets and ground turkey. The bottom line was that the vegetarian spent 17 percent percent less than her meat-eating friend did, and most of that difference was due to the price of meat. When extrapolated out over an entire year, they estimated that the vegetarian family saved about $1,180 (in mid-1990s dollars) on their annual food bill.
Beans, grains, veggies—these are the staples of populations around the world. Think of Mexico and South America, where inexpensive rice and beans coupled with corn tortillas and avocados are part of every diet; or rural China, where tofu with vegetables and rice, and maybe a very small bit of meat, is the norm; or India where people eat dal (lentils) with rice and vegetables every day. Not only are these populations by no means uniformly wealthy, they don’t have the diseases of wealthy countries. The general populations who eat these simple diets may get waterborne illnesses and lung infections from bad environmental conditions, but they don’t have anywhere near the rates of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes that we have—until they are exposed to our Western diet, that is.
And that’s something to think about. Not only is a healthful plant-based diet less expensive at the grocery store (unless you go crazy for packaged convenience foods, of course), it saves you personally and saves us societally in health care and many other direct and indirect costs. If you think these don’t affect you so much, think again. On the individual level alone, consider that your health insurance never pays for everything: even the best of plans charge deductibles and disallow certain medications. Being sick is expensive. More than that, a huge part of our country’s annual budget is given over to health-care costs, paid for by your tax dollars. And indirect health-care costs due to lost productivity adversely affect you in the form of higher taxes, too.
On the health-care front, when you consider that meat and dairy foods clog our bodies with saturated fat, growth hormones, and antibiotics, things that have been conclusively linked to cancer, heart disease, and obesity, as well as a general “blah” feeling, it’s certainly a lot less expensive—and less painful—to prevent debilitating diseases through our food choices than it is to treat them later (through bypass surgery or angioplasty, for example, which can run up tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills).
Remember in the last chapter where we looked at the link between diet and Alzheimer’s? Well Alzheimer’s doesn’t just steal one’s memory or personality (as if that weren’t enough), it also costs more than you can imagine. According to a report by the Alzheimer’s Association, “from 2010 to 2050, the cost of caring for Americans sixty-five and older with Alzheimer’s disease will increase more than six times, to $1.08 trillion. Currently, $172 billion a year is spent by the government, private insurance and individuals to care for people with the disease, the most common cause of dementia.”
What about other health conditions?
A 2010 study from Emory University in Atlanta shows that obesity-related health-care costs in the U.S. have hit $145 billion and are expected to top $340 billion by 2018. That will represent more than one-fifth of all health-care spending annually, and about half of it will be publicly financed. Indirect costs from lost productivity attributable to obesity will roughly double that figure.
Heart disease costs more than $500 billion annually, and the disease is almost totally preventable with a plant-based diet. And cancer? More than $225 billion. Diabetes? About $175 billion, with an indisputable link to diet.
Disease is expensive, both to the individuals and