The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won’t improve your health or save the planet

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.