Diabetic Nation

News on the nonvegetarian American diet: a prescription for diabetes, heart disease and global warming. Terence McNally, at Alternet.

"If you go back to the Great Depression or before -- and frankly for much of our sojourn on earth -- people couldn't afford to eat meat twice or three times a day. We ate beans and vegetables and fruits and things, much of it coming from our own gardens. Nowadays, for whatever reason, our culture has allowed us to have bacon and eggs for breakfast, baloney sandwiches for lunch, and fried chicken for dinner. And we are paying a terrible price."

"Americans now eat a million animals per hour -- mostly chickens. Americans now have this tremendous appetite for chicken, naively imagining chicken is somehow a health food, which it's clearly not. Chicken has chicken fat in it. The leanest beef that my Uncle Harold can raise is about 29 percent fat, as a percentage of calories. The leanest chicken, even without the skin, is about 23 percent fat. A bean is about 4 percent.

"We have 100 million belching cows on the North American continent. People talk about global warming. There's a lot you can do, but the first thing by all means is retire those cows."