The Stone Age gave us arrow heads and eventually knives, and that allowed us to kill animals in ways you couldn't before, and once you had them you were able to remove the skin and bones.

While it's certainly true that many people think that dairy doesn't have a cost to the animal, it's because they never went to a dairy farm.

Since I first went to India twenty some years ago, there's been a palpable change. There's now pizza everywhere, meat is much more popular than it's ever been. Vegetarianism is "that quaint thing our parents did."

The dangers of eating animal products occur after the age of reproduction. If people developed cardiovascular disease that was fatal by the age of twelve or thirteen, eating animals would have died out long ago. You get it after you've already reproduced.

In my own life, I decided to leave meat off my plate in medical school, but was a bit slow to realise that dairy products and eggs are not health foods either.

Another advantage of avoiding sodas is that you will avoid the caffeine that is in many of them. Caffeine is a weak diuretic that causes calcium loss via the kidneys.

You will find that your taste buds have a memory of about 3 weeks.