Transcriber: Kay Wang Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
I am an Olympian.
A silver medal cyclist from the London 2012 summer games.
I competed at the highest level of my sport for 12 years,
with a voracious appetite for winning.
Prior to my cycling career,
I was a fashion model, who walked the runways of New York;
all the time hiding a cocaine dependency and the darkness
of a life-threatening eating disorder.
Truthfully, I was no better than a junkie,
mistreating my body to the point of near physical and psychological ruin.
And after, not one, but two suicide attempts,
I had reached a fork in the road.
I knew that I was either going to die of anorexia,
or was going to have to choose to live.
I didn't know if I would pull off the living part,
but something deep inside me told me that I had to try.
And so I did.
Three years of intensive therapy ensued.
Most days I wanted to quit, but, I didn't.
And towards the very end of that three year healing journey,
my therapist recommended to me that I try an activity or a sport of some kind
so I could learn to move my body in a healthy way again,
which I hadn't been able to do for so many years.
I really quite randomly chose cycling.
Just sounded fun at the time.
Freedom, wind in my face, being outside.
Well, I just never looked back.
And in 2012, I stood on the Olympic podium.
A junkie's life all but a dust cloud in my rear-view mirror.
And when I stood on that Olympic podium, I had trained a lot -
six hours a day, six days a week, for many, many, many years.
I had circled endless, endless laps, and high-banked velodromes.
Climbed up mountains, downed twisting descents faster than cars.
I did all of this so that I could try and produce
almost 1000 watts of power off the start line at the Olympic games.
Now, that's enough to power five 47-inch flat screen TVs.
And that's me on the start line looking a little tiny bit nervous.
More nervous than I am right now.
(Laughter)
I did all of this, all of this training and so much more,
for what I call "Olympic Level Compassion."
That is, I did it, eating no meat whatsoever.
Zero.
None.
Now, why in the world, no meat?
Most of you are like: What? Where is this going?
Why would you do that to yourself? What does that even mean, right?
Well, let me just tell you my journey of how I got there
and how I coined this term "Olympic Level Compassion."
One really late night, we were on the east coast racing
and I was up in the middle of the night, exhausted from the race,
yet I couldn't sleep - we've all been there -
and I'm just mindlessly flicking through the channels
and I land on this exposé that depicts the hidden camera footage
of the horrific cruelty that goes on behind closed doors at slaughterhouses.
The images and the video were showing cows and pigs
that were being beaten, blinded, some burnt,
kicked, cut, and some of them
with sharp objects shoved up their anuses to get them to move to slaughter.
I was horrified.
I was terrified too.
And, at the same time, it was like, I was humbled and ashamed
because as a meat-eater, I was a party to this.
Well, that night I said,
"I don't care how hard it is or what it takes;
I'm never eating meat again because I can't stand that animals go through this
just to make it to my dinner plate."
So now, that same exact hunger that I had had
that drove me to excel in cycling,
that same hunger that drove me to excel in my recovery from anorexia,
was now driving me to completely rethink the way we behave
when it comes to our food.
Research shows us that 95 percent of the cruelty to animals
occurs at the hands of the meat and dairy industry.
These industries confine, mutilate, and slaughter
60 billion land animals every year.
60 billion.
That's eight times as many animals going through slaughterhouses lines
as there are people on the planet.
And, each and every one of these animals
that grinds through this factory farm system
greatly harms the environment.
Factory farming is a much larger producer of global carbon emissions
than all of technology combined.
All of it; cars, trucks, and coal.
Right now in California, we're in a historic drought.
We're all trying to save water here and there, in-between.
Scrub-a-dub-dubs in the shower, however you're doing it.
Well, it takes 16 gallons of water to grow eight ounces of soy milk.
That is, the water that takes to water those soy beans to grow.
That sounds like a lot;
16 gallons of water for just eight little measly ounces of soy milk.
But it takes 850 gallons of water to grow eight ounces of beef.
That burger you had yesterday is equivalent
to 30 average American showers.
A plant-based person consumes
200 000 gallons of water less
than a person who eats the average American diet.
But just as important to me as this environmental impact
is the emotional toll.
Because each and every one of these animals is capable of feeling
anxiety, pain, fear, comfort, and joy.
The same exact feelings as the dogs and cats who are in our homes.
So, home, right?
Alright.
We're just going to talk for a minute about the animals that are in our home.
Consider for a moment the Thanksgiving dinner table.
It is s common to serve a Butterball turkey at Thanksgiving
because Butterball is the largest producer of turkey meat
in the United States.
And I would confess that roasted bird, with all its trimmings,
and "fixins", as we say in the South, looks appetizing, it does.
But looks can be wildly deceiving.
Because, here's the ugly truth:
In 2011, workers at Butterball were convicted on felony charges
of cruelty to factory farm birds.
These workers routinely kicked, stomped, and dragged these birds
by their wings and by their necks.
They beat the birds with metal bars, seemingly for sport,
as they caught on tape.
And as for the baby chicks who don't get to make it to slaughter,
they throw them in a trough and then they grind them up while they're still alive
in macerating machines.
I know, it sounds so cruel.
There has to be another way.
Because 96 percent of us say we're against cruelty towards animals.
Right?
96 percent of you are against what we just saw.
Yet we still torture and mutilate 60 billion of them every year.
Do these numbers make sense to you?
This doesn't have to be about hippies and tree-hugging and tofu eating
because, honestly, I'm the furthest thing away from a hippie.
But this is honestly just about the heart and soul of Mother Earth
and the heart and soul of these animals.
They are in our care.
So, what does it take for us to care enough to just take action on it?
Do we just need to see what happens to these animals?
Do we just need to see, you know, footage, pictures?
Because I can show you.
Do we need to smell the disease-infested hollow halls of the slaughterhouses?
Maybe we need to hear the screams of the animals as they head to slaughter,
or as we shove them to slaughter?
If you want to meet me after,
I'll take you on a tour, but be careful what you ask for.
Maybe, you say, it needs to affect you personally, physically;
it needs to affect you.
Okay; well, it does.
Stress is known to promote tumor growth in many, many types of cancers.
Cortisol is the stress hormone our body produces
when we are under feelings of stress.
Anxiety, loneliness, pain, and even exhaustion.
The exact same feelings these factory farm animals are experiencing.
And so they produce pretty intensely high levels of cortisol.
When we eat the meat of these factory farm animals,
we are eating their cortisol.
In other words, we are ingesting their stress,
to go along with the stress we already have.
Dr. Eric Sternlicht, who's a professor of health science
right here at Chapman University and who's my mentor, says,
External stressors promote tumor growth.
So, we have all this evidence I've just presented:
that factory farming ruins the environment,
that meat and dairy intake promote cancer,
and that the animals go through horrific suffering, as we have seen on tape.
So then, what's the alternative?
I've got to give you an alternative, right?
After showing you all this.
Well, evidence shows that a plant-based lifestyle is both planet-friendly
and can help to prevent cancer.
When I went plant-based, I specifically did it, as I told you guys,
because of my Olympic Level Compassion, and I couldn't stand that animals
had to go through this just to make it to my plate.
But these changes in my body started occurring that I was just amazed by.
My joint pain started disappearing, my back pain got better,
my PMS subsided.
Husband was like, "Two thumbs up on that one."
My mind got clearer and crisper, and my recovery process,
which is the most important aspect to an elite athlete's life,
sped up so abruptly that I was now recovering at half the time of teammates
who were ten years my junior.
As a plant-based athlete, I stood on the Olympic podium
just five months shy of my 40th birthday.
The oldest competitor ever in the Olympic games in my specific discipline.
So most athletes, most athletic trainers too,
they associate recovery or repair with protein.
So, 100 calories of beef has ten grams of protein.
100 calories of spinach has 12 grams of protein.
I know some of you are like, "What? Why didn't somebody tell me this before?"
It's true, look it up.
Plants, greens, vegetables; they have protein.
They have a lot of protein because they're alive,
and every living thing has protein.
And you don't just have to believe me,
other plant-based athletes that have adopted Olympic Level Compassion
that are right at the top of their game.
Mixed martial art great Mac Danzig.
How about the abdominals, ladies.
Or gentlemen.
(Laughter)
Nine time Olympic gold medalist, Carl Lewis.
Tennis legend, Martina Navratilova.
Houston, Texas running back Arian Foster; yep, he went plant-based in 2012,
and the next season he led the NFL
in number of carries and rushing touchdowns.
Popeye.
(Laughter)
I'm just saying; he was kind of ahead of his time I think though, right?
Alright, quick pop quiz.
I'm only giving you two choices so it's going to be easy.
But the question is: how much protein do we need on a daily basis?
Because that's important.
How much?
Because protein is having a moment right now in the media, in my opinion.
Two choices and here they are -
if I could get a show of hands, that would be awesome -
How many people think you need two grams of protein
per pound of body weight per day
to maintain healthy muscle tissue and repair after your workouts?
How many people think that's the right answer?
Okay.
How many people think it's one gram
of protein per pound of body weight per day?
Okay, more of you think the second one.
I'm going to give you a visual reference because that's probably helpful.
I weight around 135 pounds,
and I need 65 grams of protein per day.
That's a half a gram of protein per pound of body weight per day
to repair for my tough workouts.
So, still you may be asking, or I hope you're asking,
"If I care enough to adopt a plant-based lifestyle,
if I maybe just even care enough to go home and look into it deeper
or do more research or understand it better,
how can just I make a difference, because I'm just one person?"
Well, I'd like to encourage you to go meatless for the rest of the day.
(Gasp)
How about a challenge?
I'd like to challenge you to go meatless for the rest of the day.
And as you do, just think of this:
if one person, just one, goes meatless,
you will save the brutally slaughtered lives
of 2000 of these land animals in your lifetime.
I'd like to just leave you with this story of the starfish.
After a violent storm at the beach, an old man walked up to a little girl
who was tossing starfish, one by one, back into the water.
Now, the beach was covered with starfish as far as the eye could see,
and all of them were struggling to get back into the water.
But the tide was low and the sun was really hot,
and the starfish, it seemed, they were doomed.
The old man said to the little girl, "You know, you're never
going to make a difference here because there are far too many."
And with that, the little girl bent down.
She picked up a starfish, she tossed it back into the ocean
and she said, "I made a difference to that one."
It just takes one.
(Applause)