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.)