In his new website, Dr. John McDougall highlights four deadly dietary deceptions – protein, calcium, omega-3 and starch – that have been used to ensure humans willingly become fat, sick and nearly dead while pharmaceutical companies profit off our chronic diseases and medical procedures.

In a system that makes money off death, disease and destruction, death for the animals, diseases for humans and destruction for the planet, it is understandable that such deadly deceptions are also employed to hide the true ecological impacts of our dietary choices.

Our first step to combat these deceptions is to first get familiar with them.

Goodland and Anhang did the world a great service when they dissected the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s (UN FAO) Livestock’s Long Shadow report and highlighted all the miscounting, errors and omissions in it. However, even they didn’t catch an egregious example of “MeatSplaining” in the UN FAO statistical conventions that hides the devastating ecological impacts of animal agriculture.

MeatSplaining is the term used for the collection of rhetorical strategies by which the animal agriculture industry, like other profit-driven industries, aggressively seeks to shield itself from public scrutiny.

The UN FAO is a scientific body with a public Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) partnership with the International Meat Secretariat, the International Dairy Federation, the International Poultry Council and the International Egg Commission. Therefore, the UN FAO is a thoroughly “meatwashed” scientific body.

Please take a good look at the figure above. The satellite photo on the left reveals a strange deforestation pattern in the Amazon, where clumps of trees are left behind while the rest are clear cut. On the right is a chart created by “Our World in Data” using statistics compiled by the UN FAO. It shows that global forest cover has barely declined between 1950 and 2018 from 44% to 38% while the extent of grazing lands has remained unchanged at 31%.

Ask yourself these questions:

• How is it that the extent of grazing lands remained unchanged between 1950 and 2018 while the production of meat almost quadrupled in that time frame by the UN FAO’s own admission?
• If the forest cover of the planet barely declined between 1950 and 2018, then why is the World Wildlife Fund documenting a 68% decline in wild vertebrate biomass between 1970 and 2016?

Then enter into the UN FAO’s twilight zone of Meatsplained reality to seek answers.

First, the UN FAO adopts a “scientific convention” that any 1Km X 1Km land area with greater than 10% tree cover is a “forest grid” and propagates this convention worldwide into every scientific forum. Then, government authorities buzz cut their forests leaving clumps of trees behind so that every 1Km X 1Km land area still has at least 10% tree cover.

Voila!

Forests decimated!

The true extent of grazing lands increased for domestic animals!

Yet magically, official statistics show forests are still standing and the extent of grazing lands unchanged since 1950.

The UN FAO’s statistical sleight of hand would make Houdini proud.

No doubt the UN FAO scientists patted each other on the back for a job well done.

Except our pesky planet insists on meting out the ecological consequences for our statistical myopia, as any engineer worth her/his salt could have told the UN FAO scientists.

And shame on our governments for colluding in this MeatSplaining deception with the UN FAO. But what else can you expect from governments who deliberately insert Dr. McDougall’s four deadly deceptions in our childrens’ science textbooks?

Perhaps such deliberate lying to children and the general public should be considered a crime against humanity? Such lies can and do kill as much as 40 million humans annually from avoidable chronic diseases and hunger related causes. This carnage accumulated over the years makes the carnage of the Second World War look like a picnic.

So what is the true extent of deforestation that has occurred on this planet? In the next newsletter, we will show that it is at least 84%, a far cry from the 33% the UN FAO is pretending it to be.

All the best,