Health and Food by the Numbers: A Few Facts from the Book
Consumer Health:* Some 325,000 Americans are hospitalized each year for food-related illnesses; more than 5000 die annually.
* Two thirds of Americans are overweight, and 30% are medically obese. The rate of obesity among children and adolescents has risen from 4% in the 1970s to nearly 15% today.
* Diet and physical activity are now the second leading cause of preventable deaths in America, after tobacco.
* Medical costs to treat these diet-related ailments, such as diabetes and heart disease, run $78 billion a year — nearly 10% of all US medical expenditures.
Environment
* Factory farms, packing thousands of animals into barns and feedlots, produce more than 1.3 billion tons of waste each year — enough to fill 52 million 18-wheeler semi trucks.
* US agriculture dumps nearly 500,000 tons of pesticides — many of them carcinogenic — on food crops each year.
* Agricultural pesticides kill an estimated 67 million birds annually.
* Over the past 30 years, nearly half of all pesticides studied have been found in stream sediment and in 64% of edible fish and other aquatic life.
* In California’s Central Valley, 2.6 million cows have become the region’s top emitter of reactive organic gases, a major smog ingredient. Workers:
* Roughly 20% of meatpacking workers are injured on the job each year, many crippled by carpal tunnel syndrome.
* Sixty-one percent of farmworkers earn incomes below the poverty level.
* Nearly 500 farmworkers suffer acute pesticide poisonings every year — in California alone.
* The federally approved line speed limit for chicken processing plants is 91 birds per minute.Food and Farming, Inc.
* More than 17,000 farmers go out of business each year — one farmer every half an hour.
* Four corporations control 80% of the American beef business; four firms control 67% of the US seed market.
* The top five food grocers in America, led by Wal-Mart, take in nearly half of all retail food sales.
* Supermarket markups of farm produce run as high as 900%. For instance, farmers in February 2004 were getting $.19 for a pound of lettuce for which consumers paid up to $1.92.
* There are now as many prisoners in America as there are farmers.
(Note: All source information is available in the book.)
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