[Editor’s Note: It is amazing that CNN is covering this topic. It is clearly a signal that the industrial farming system has gotten completely out of hand and dangerous when mainstream media outlets like CNN and the Washington Post are suddenly hiring young, attractive food writers to tell us to cut back on our meat consumption. As always, the OCA is not trying to push a “vegetarian agenda,” but merely to advocate conscious food choices, including that of supporting responsible agriculture, which does not include factory farmed meat. This is a very informative article with a fresh spin on a high-traffic topic.]

New York (CNN) — Beyond the unhealthy influence that our demand for factory-farmed meat has in the area of food-borne illness and communicable diseases, we could cite many other influences on public health, most obviously the now-widely recognized relationship between the nation’s major killers — heart disease, No. 1; cancer, No. 2; and stroke, No. 3 — and meat consumption.

Or, much less obviously, the distorting influence of the meat industry on the information about nutrition we receive from the government and medical professionals.

In 1917, while World War I devastated Europe and just before the Spanish flu devastated the world, a group of women, in part motivated to make maximal use of America’s food resources during wartime, founded what is now the nation’s premier group of food and nutrition professionals, the American Dietetic Association.

Since the 1990s, the group has issued what has become the standard we-definitely-know-this-much summary of the healthfulness of a vegetarian diet. The association takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products.