Climate Change does not only ruin the environment around us, it has a large impact on the environment within us. Vector-born and water-borne diseases thrive in certain climate conditions; temperature and precipitation are the most important while sea-level elevation, wind, and daylight duration are also important. These factors are increasing with the effects of climate change making diseases and other illnesses easier for humans to be infected with. Diseases can alter how one lives one day-to-day life. For this article, I will be focusing on Lyme Disease in particular and how this disease forever altered my life. Through Lyme Disease I realized how diet is key to not only healing yourself but healing the planet.
Lyme Disease is a bacterial infection you get from the bite of an infected tick. Symptoms of the initial infection go beyond the well-known “bullseye” rash and can include fever, headache, chills, fatigue, muscle, and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes. If the infection isn’t treated, symptoms can worsen to severe headaches, arthritis, and severe joint pain, dizziness, nerve pain, and memory issues. I caught my Lyme at a bad time and now struggle with constant brain fog and fatigue. At the peak of my Lyme Symptoms, I felt out of the body, like watching my body and actions from above. This is extremely common in Lyme patients and the constant foggy-mindedness and tiredness take a serious toll on one’s mental health. Getting out of bed was a daily challenged. For a year of my life, I missed out on a lot of things, friends’ birthdays, family gatherings, school events. This disease warped me into hating and treating my body horribly. I wanted to feel like my old self again and would do anything too.
Although Lyme Disease is underlooked it has enough effect on your life to completely change it. I was 17 and showering felt like a chore to me. I constantly thought how did this happen so fast and what can I do to fix myself. The medicine wasn’t working so I knew I needed to take it into my own hands. I researched for hours on ways that I can heal myself. When I stumbled upon a documentary, What The Health, it completely changed how I saw the world. What the Health critiques the health impact of meat and dairy products consumption, and questions the practices of the leading health and pharmaceutical organizations. Its primary purpose is to advocate for a plant-based diet. A vegan diet is amazing for one’s health as well as the environment. When you eliminate animal products from your diet, it lightens the workload on your entire system. By incorporating more plants into one’s diet it helps to create better blood flow to the brain, which delivers vital nutrients and oxygen. New studies are showing that indulging in large amounts of animal products such as meat, dairy, and eggs can raise stress levels in the body. As explained by Dr. Neal Barnard in his book, Power Foods for the brain, “cortisol levels tend to rise with consumption of animal products.”. This means animal products put more stress on your body and cause more of your body’s energy to go to help disgust this heavy and unagreeable food.
In the average diet, animal products make up 60% of emissions. Learning about the energy that goes into the food on one’s plate helps one be more conscious of what they consume. Consuming a meat-eating diet directly increases the damage from climate change. If the world is to meet its target of limiting global warming to “well below” 2C, some degree of diet shift will be necessary. If we aim to strive for the most optimistic target of keeping warming to 1.5C, changes to diet maybe even more crucial. With all of this information at everyone’s fingertips, it confuses me as to why more people wouldn’t be vegan. It seemed as if the information doesn’t agree with one’s lifestyle they turn that information away and find something that suits them. How could one ignore the suffering and violence these animals face, which then destructs the land and atmosphere later on? So many of my friends are activists for the health of the planet and claim they are animal lovers, but their plates say otherwise.
I was once a heavy animal product consumer, meat, cheese, ice cream, you name it but I was also so desperate and exhausted. Once I discovered the damage animal-based diet does to my body and more importantly mother earth, I never looked at it the same. I was actively contributing to increasing the disease that was hurting me. I committed to treating my body and all living things on Earth with the respect that it deserves. Incorporating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and beans into my diet allowed my immune system to function at its best. Three months into practicing my vegan lifestyle I saw a drastic change in my energy levels. I spent less time out of bed and more time outside. I had a clearer mind and felt stronger within myself.
Lyme Disease is the most common vector-borne disease in the United States and continuing to grow. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that at least 300,000 people are infected with Lyme disease each year in the United States. That’s 25,000 new cases per month. Twenty-five percent of those patients are children, ages 5 to 14. Climate Change is the mainer driver of this constant increase.
The life cycle and prevalence of ticks are strongly influenced by temperature. Warming temperatures associated with climate change are predicted to increase the range of suitable tick habitats and are therefore one of the multiple factors driving the observed spread of Lyme disease. Tick activity depends on temperatures being above a certain minimum, shorter winters could also extend the period when ticks are active each year, increasing the time that humans could be exposed to Lyme disease. Another reason for the increase in Lyme Disease from climate change is the geographic range of the tick vector which has expanded westward from the northeast United States as well as southward year after year. For ticks to be maintained in nature, they need to have an animal that they have harbor the bacterium in the tick that causes Lyme Disease. On the East Coast, the reservoir is the white-footed mouse. In California, the Western gray squirrel harbors the bacterium. Lizards are also a reservoir for Borrelia burgdorferi, a common host for the black-legged tick in California as well. This all increases the risk of infections to humans by maintaining the tick population in the wild. The increase in tick bites is a direct correlation with the warming climate.
Throughout my sickness, I uncovered my veil of ignorance to obscene damage humans cause to the planet. Lyme Disease is growing due to the warming temperatures, lack of biodiversity, and increased deforestation. Through educating oneself on the positives that a vegan diet serves to the planet it’s hard to blind yourself once again to the animal products in your fridge. I learned to take care of my bodies in ways that would benefit me, the animals of our earth, and mother nature. This did not only cause me to heal myself but took me on a path to forever want to protect our planet. Everyone looks to everyone else for the destruction of our planet, if only we could look at our actions and consumption. I believe humans have to care for mother nature as she provides so much for us.
