Three thousand animals are murdered against their will every second in slaughterhouses across the globe. The leading cause of death in America is heart disease, and the world is facing an obesity epidemic. C02 and methane emissions are through the roof—and so are the costs of health care and surgery.

All of these problems have one major cause: animal agriculture.

“Right now, I want you to think about how you would feel if the moment you were born, someone else had already planned the day of your execution. Because that’s what it’s like to be a cow, a pig, a chicken or a turkey on this planet,” public speaker Gary Yourofsky said. “They’re not born free, they’re born to be murdered, even though freedom is supposed to be a birthright.”

According to One Green Planet (OGP), on average, meat eaters consume over 3,000 land animals, and over 6,000 marine animals in their lifetime.

Despite the fact that many people are unaware of the truth, people are finding out all of the lies that the meat and dairy industry have been hiding. Shocking videos of animals being beaten, cramped into small cages hardly bigger than their bodies, and baby pigs being castrated–without anesthetic. This behavior happens within multiple industries, one being Tyson chicken, a company whose commercials target young teens and kids.

And if you’re thinking, ‘Hey, that’s really unfortunate, but we, as humans, were meant to eat meat. We’ve got the pointy teeth, see?’ Consider this.

“Find a two-year-old child. Place the child in a crib, and in the crib, put two things: an apple, and a live rabbit,” Yourofsky said. “If the child eats the bunny rabbit and plays with the apple, send me an e-mail, because I’ll buy everyone in this room a brand new car.”

Humans have almost all of the same characteristics of a frugivorous gorilla—who thrive on fruit. We have flattened molars, and believe it or not, our incisors are even flattened. If you think your teeth are sharp, compare them to that of a tiger and I promise you–yours are not sharp. Humans are also the only species to consume milk that comes from another animal.

Consuming meat and dairy is not only unnatural and unethical, but it’s also horrible for human health, and extremely unsafe.

“People have to understand the importance of the life jacket and the guardian of our blood vessels–the endothelium. It makes an absolutely magical gas that protects all of our vasculature–nitric oxide,” author and physician Caldwell Esselstyn said. “From age five, six, seven, Americans are eating western foods. Every time certain foods pass your lips, you decimate, injure, and compromise the ability of your endothelial cells to produce nitric oxide from childhood.”

Esselstyn is the director of the prevent and reverse heart disease program at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. He was also chairman of the breast cancer task force in the late 1970s. He began his research because he wanted to prevent and reverse diseases rather than try to fix them after the fact.

“For no matter how many women I was doing breast surgery, I was doing nothing for the next unsuspecting victim,” Esselstyn said. “There seems to be a lot more reward if we could get people to eat to save their heart. They would be saving themselves not only from cardiovascular disease, but also saving themselves from the common western cancers of breast, colon, pancreatic and many others.”

According to the Primary Care Reports, people who already have diabetes can treat and even reverse their disease using diet and lifestyle. One study found that by putting 20 thin diabetic men on a high-carbohydrate, low-fat high-fiber diet, the men reduced their insulin dosages from up to 20 units a day to a low 12 units a day in only 16 days. Some of the men were able to completely discontinue their insulin by continuing their diet as an outpatient.

People across the globe are taking to a plant-based lifestyle in an attempt to cure their cancer, diabetes, hypertension and many other diseases.

Despite what others may think, animal agriculture not only affects health, but the environment as well.

According to OGP, 2,000 trees are lost to deforestation every minute, 80 percent of which are lost due to animal agriculture—1,600 fewer trees to keep excess CO2 from contributing to pollution and global warming every 60 seconds.

They also found that meat eaters use 160 percent more land resources than people who eat a plant based diet. If one person gave up burgers, bacon and nuggets, they would save 162,486 gallons of water annually. That’s enough water needed for 445 people.

Not only could we provide people in need with water, we could also provide them with food.

According to OGP, if every American stopped eating meat, there would be enough grain to feed 1.4 billion people. That’s enough to feed every hungry person on the planet more than one and a half times over if we could just allocate the grain use to raise livestock for direct human consumption instead.

According to Centers for Disease Control, someone in the U.S. has a heart attack every 43 seconds. Furthermore, every minute, one person dies from a heart-disease related incident.

And if ethics, environment or health doesn’t get you, money definitely will.

The CDC found that coronary heart disease alone costs the United States $108.9 billion each year. This includes the cost of health care services, medications, and lost productivity.

That’s a lot of dough (and I don’t mean pizza).

Wondering why you didn’t know about all this? Well, despite what you may have thought, the government plays a large role.

“The USDA makes a new food pyramid every five years for Americans to live by. Having the USDA make your food pyramid–you might as well have Al Capone do your taxes,” Esselstyn said. “All the members of the food industry who have been former executives are now the ones who hold the high positions in the USDA. The whole thing is terribly conflicted.”

Before you run to your doctor at the first sign of a cold, maybe you should check with your stomach first.

“The real tragedy of course–and it’s a national embarrassment–was that nutrition is never taught in medical school,” Esselstyn said. “Even worse, it’s never taught in postgraduate training as you train to be a family physician, or even a cardiologist.”

Pharmaceutical companies even fund medical schools, so that doctors are taught to treat health issues with expensive drugs that have bad side effects, as opposed to the simplest, most potent tool that we have today—food—just so they can earn millions.

So next time you try to argue with a vegetarian or vegan using something like: ‘I like bacon too much’ or, ‘we need meat and dairy to survive,’ make sure you educate yourself first.

It takes 660 gallons of water just to get that quarter pounder on your plate. Now maybe you’ll think twice before ordering those “chicken” McNuggets.