It’s flu season and many are choosing to get the flu vaccine. This choice is generally a good idea but should be made only after consulting your doctor. The vaccine is about 40% effective in preventing you from getting influenza. While getting the vaccine might keep you from getting the flu or lessen the severity it doesn’t stop the disease from occurring in the first place. Wouldn’t it be better to keep the disease from ever happening in the first place than relying on a partially effective vaccine to protect us? We think so and have written an article published in Juniper Online Journal of Public Health. We can actually stop the flu from developing thus preventing many people from getting sick or dying.

The flu doesn’t have to happen. It can be stopped. To understand how we need to drill down a little deeper.

Every year a flu vaccine is produced in the hope of preventing infection with a virus that can frequently mutate. The mutations are caused because crowded farm animals come in contact with the virus and then act as mixing vessels resulting in a new mutated virus. Given the crowded conditions in industrialized farming the virus can spread rapidly between the animals and then to the farm workers who can bring the virus into the human community and start the spread of the disease. With modern travel where people can travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours, the flu can spread very rapidly.

The only way to actually stop the flu is to stop the crowding of billions of animals together in intensive factory farms, thus eliminating viral reservoirs, mutations resulting in new viruses, and farm workers who come into contact with these animals and then spread the disease to other people. We can actually stop the flu by simply not eating animals. In doing so we cut the chain of events resulting in influenza epidemics and pandemics. In this regard the plant-based diet, if adopted large scale, can actually end the flu.