I know you work hard to make the best lifestyle choices
so you can improve your health, destiny, and longevity.
And there’s lots of information out there on how to do just that.
So where do you start? Well – we start with the facts.
Welcome to the Nutrition Facts Podcast – I’m your host Dr. Michael Greger.
My job is to bring you the latest peer- reviewed nutrition and health research
and share it with you here.
Today we look at the carbon footprint of what we eat –
starting with the findings of the Eat-Lancet commission –
a collaboration between 37 experts from 16 countries
that lays out the best diet for human and planetary health.
Scientists have a clear moral obligation to clearly warn humanity
of any catastrophic threat and to tell it like it is.
In November 2019, more than 11,000 scientists from 150 countries
clearly and unequivocally declared that planet Earth
is facing a climate emergency.
CO2 levels are rising, the glaciers are melting, Antarctica is melting.
The oceans are getting hotter, more acidic.
Sea levels are rising, and so are extreme weather events.
And yes, fossil fuel use is going up, like air travel, but
so is per capita meat consumption. In fact, one of the solutions
they offer to help the climate crisis is eating mostly
plant-based foods while reducing the global consumption of animal products.
And what makes designing a sustainable diet so easy is that the same advice—
like eat less meat—is good for both personal health, like reducing
the risk of our number #1 killer, as well as for planetary health.
The least healthy foods also cause the worst environmental impact.
The foods with the most nutrition just so happen to be the foods
that cause the lowest greenhouse gas emissions, so you get this win-win effect.
So let's put it all together.
If we are to redesign the global food system for human and planetary health—
which is to say human health and future human health—what would it look like?
Enter: the EAT-Lancet Commission, the result of more than two years
of collaboration between 37 experts from 16 countries, suggesting
a cut in total meat consumption down to like an ounce a day—
that's like the weight of a single chicken nugget—
all the while dramatically increasing our intakes
of legumes—which are beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils—
nuts, fruits, and vegetables,
because we're not just in a climate crisis, but a health crisis.
Unhealthy diets cause more death and disease than smoking,
more than unsafe sex, and alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined.
But we can address both crises at the same time
by increasing our consumption of whole plant foods
and substantially reducing our consumption of animal source foods.
Eating such a diet could save the lives of more than 10 million people a year
and may just help save the world.
The Paris Agreement had set out a boundary condition,
an aspirational goal for a carbon budget to help prevent catastrophic impacts,
and staying within the boundary for climate change
can be achieved by consuming plant-based diets.
And the personal benefits may be comparable with or even exceed
the value of the environmental benefits.
The healthcare benefits alone for a healthy global diet—
a predominantly plant-based diet, a vegetarian or a vegan diet—
could exceed the price of the carbon saved.
We're talking up to $30 trillion dollars a year saved
from the health benefits alone.
Now if the health of yourself, the planet, and your own children
doesn't quite motivate you, consider that you may also be facing threats
to the global beer supply.
And healthier diets don't just reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Since livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss,
reducing meat consumption is also the key
to biodiversity conservation, ideally, perhaps, reducing demand
for animal-based foods by increasing
the proportion of plant-based foods up to like 90% of the diet.
Livestock production is also a leading cause of soil loss, water
and nutrient pollution. Yet it appears to be a blind spot in water policy.
Despite the fact that animal products form the single most important factor
in humanity's water footprint,
water managers never seem to talk about meat and dairy.
But it's not just animal products.
I mean, yes, at least 80% of the deforestation in the Amazon
is to raise cattle and grow feed crops like soybeans
to export to other farm animals,
but also to make vegetable oil, most of which is from palm and soy.
Both crops have been expanding, resulting in massive deforestation.
It just seems particularly egregious if that deforestation takes place
for the sake of junk food.
Not everyone agrees we should be moving to healthier diets, though.
The World Health Organization actually pulled out of the EAT-Lancet Commission
because of their promotion of a global move to more plant-based foods.
See, if we focused on promoting predominantly plant-based foods
and excluding foods deemed unhealthy, including meat and other
animal-based foods, such a diet could, yeah, save 10 million lives a year,
$30 trillion dollars, and help save the entire planet, but could lead
to the loss of jobs linked to animal husbandry and the production of junk.
In our next story we look at how much greenhouse gas
is caused by the production of different foods –
measured in miles driven or even light bulb hour equivalents.
And yes, that’s a thing.
Our eating habits are making us and the planet increasingly unhealthy.
Ours is a lose-lose situation;
a global transformation of the food system is urgently needed.
In consideration of the mounting evidence regarding the environmental effects of
foods, for the 2015 to 2020 U.S. Dietary Guidelines the scientific advisory
committee included for the first time a chapter focused on food safety
and sustainability, concluding, "a dietary pattern that is higher
in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits,
whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds,
and lower in animal-based foods, is not only more health promoting
but also associated with lesser environmental impact..."
Despite unprecedented public support, this and other sustainability language
was, not surprisingly, vanished from the final Dietary Guidelines
published jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They're not even
sufficiently sticking to the science on healthy eating either, including no, or
too lax limits for animal-source foods, despite the available evidence.
Even if they ignored planetary health altogether and just stuck to the latest
evidence on healthy eating, it would have knock-on environmental benefits.
Replacing animal-source foods with plant-based ones would not only
improve nutrition and help people live longer,
but could reduce greenhouse gas emissions up to 84%.
In general, plant-based foods cause fewer adverse environmental effects
by nearly any measure. In terms of carbon footprint, all the foods that are
the equivalent of driving more than a mile per serving are animal products.
Even though something like a lamb chop or farmed fish may be the worst,
eating chicken still causes like five times the global warming
than even something like tropical fruit, though the climate superstars
are legumes—beans, split peas, chickpeas, and lentils.
For example, in the United States, substituting beans for beef
at the national level could alone deliver up to 75% of the 2020 greenhouse gas
emissions reduction target and spare an area of land 1.5 times
the size of California, not to mention the health benefits.
And it's not just greenhouse gases. Kidney beans required approximately
18 times less land, 10 times less water, 9 times less fuel, 12 times less fertilizer,
and 10 times less pesticides. So yeah, according to the prestigious
EAT-Lancet Commission, more plant-based may be better,
but even a shift towards a healthier dietary pattern emphasizing whole grains,
fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes without necessarily
eating strictly-plant-based, would be beneficial.
In Europe, for example, just halving the consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs
would achieve up to a 40% reduction in nitrogen emissions and greenhouse gas
emissions, and require about a fifth less land. In addition, the dietary changes
would also lower health risks, reducing cardiovascular mortality,
their leading cause of death. Note, however, that minimizing
environmental impacts does not necessarily maximize human health.
Yes, animal products, dairy, eggs, fish, and other meat releases significantly
more greenhouse gas per serving than foods from plants;
eating added sugar and oil isn't going to do your own body any favors.
In California, including more animal products in your diet requires
an additional 10,000 quarts of water a week.
So that's like taking 150 more showers a week.
Even just skipping meat on weekdays could conserve thousands of gallons
a week compared to eating meat every day, and cut your daily
carbon footprint and total ecological footprint by about 40%.
Some countries are actually doing something about it.
The Chinese government, for example, has outlined a plan to reduce
its citizens' meat consumption by 50%, whereas much of the rest of the world
appears to be doing the complete opposite, pumping billions
of taxpayer dollars into subsidizing the meat, dairy, and egg industries.
We can certainly all try to do our part; however, an obstacle to dietary change
may be consumers' underestimation of the environmental impacts
of different types of food, but may be aided by labeling.
For example, imagine picking up a can of a beef noodle soup and seeing this.
The carbon footprint of a single half-cup serving
is like leaving a light on for 39 hours straight.
And not some eco-bulb, right? An old-school 100-watt hot incandescent,
compared to a meat-free vegetable soup—a difference of 34 light-bulb hours.
You can imagine someone getting on your case for unnecessarily leaving on a light
for 34 minutes, but this is 34 hours just eating a different half cup of soup.
Finally today, why don’t environmental groups advocate climate-friendlier diets?
Let’s find out.
In what “was arguably the largest ever environmental protest
in the world,” more than a million children, across more than
a hundred countries, joined a “Global Climate March,
demanding that governments act…”
“The concerns of the young protesters are justified”
and “supported by the best available science,”
wrote a group of scientists and scholars.
The enormous mobilization shows that young people have at least
understood the situation, and “we strongly support their demand
for rapid and forceful action.”
In terms of our food supply there are all sorts of little tweaks,
like feed additives that can reduce cattle belching,
but put all those tweaks together, according to the prestigious
EAT-Lancet Commission, and we’re only talking about
reducing agricultural greenhouse- gas emissions in 2050
by about 10% ; whereas, if we instead switched over
to plant foods, we “could reduce emissions by up to 80 percent.”
All those cow, sheep, and goat burps only represent a fraction
of the greenhouse gas emissions from animal agriculture;
so, that’s why according to the IPCC, the official Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, becoming a so-called climate carnivore,
just cutting down on ruminant products like beef,
wouldn’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much
as eating a healthier diet and limiting meat across the board.
And, the fewer animal products the better.
“Which diet has the least environmental impact on our planet?”
A systematic review found that eating completely plant-based
may be “the optimal diet for the environment.”
But it’s not all or nothing. Even just cutting down on meat
to under an ounce or two a day could get you half
the way there in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In terms of land use, a healthier diet, like a Mediterranean diet,
may decrease your footprint by about a quarter, whereas even more
plant-based diets can drop land use 50% or more.
In general, diets that include meat require
about three times more water,
13 times more fertilizer, more than twice the energy,
and 40% more pesticides than those that don’t.
If you look even broader at the total environmental impact
of omnivorous versus vegetarian versus vegan diets,
looking not just at global warming, but ocean acidification,
agricultural run-off, smog, ecotoxicity of the water and soil,
and direct human toxicity of the air we breathe
and the water we drink, and the soil we grow our food from,
eating eggs and dairy may be nine times worse than plants.
And, eating eggs, dairy, and meat may be 17 times worse
than sticking to plant foods.
Oh, and as a bonus, we could feed an additional 350 million Americans,
like an entire extra country’s worth of people—
more than if we eliminated food waste completely.
Changing meat-eating habits would seem to be a relatively
cheap and easy way to mitigate climate change,
in contrast to many other factors outside our control.
However, surveys suggest few seem to recognize this option
of eating less meat as a signiﬁcant opportunity for helping.
Research has shown that consumers often underestimate
the impacts of meat consumption on the environment in general,
and on climate change in particular.
“The outstanding effectiveness of the less meat option
(as established by climate experts) was recognized by…
[only] 6% of [Americans sampled,] and that’s after they were
prompted to assume climate change is actually happening.
“There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that
climate change is real and that we’re driving it,”
but only about half of U.S. adults believe it.
This is not by coincidence. Just like the tobacco industry
tried to subvert the overwhelming evidence that
smoking caused cancer, companies like “Exxon orchestrated
climate change denial campaign[s] that stalled
meaningful efforts… for decades.”
Certainly, environmental groups should know better, though.
“None of the highest profile NGOs examined” appeared to want
to feature the link between meat consumption and climate change.
They were all aware of the evidence, of course,
but evidently the science alone was not sufﬁcient.
It’s like another form of denialism that can become like
a negative feedback loop, where it’s not popular to talk about,
so you don’t talk about it, so it remains not popular
to talk about, depriving the issue of the attention
that it needs to break out.
And when they have messaged about it, environmental groups
have tended to favor just asking for a moderate reduction
in meat consumption, notable given the research
demonstrating how much more powerful a lever it could be
at the individual level to go even further.
But, they don’t want to be seen as telling people what to do,
instead advocating for small changes, like turning off
your computer monitor at lunchtime or printing double-sided.
But, “the cumulative impact of large numbers of individuals
making [just] marginal improvements in their environmental impact”
may end up constituting just a marginal collective improvement.
Yet, we now live at a time when we need to make
urgent and ambitious changes.
We would love it if you could share with us your stories
about reinventing your health through evidence-based nutrition.
Go to nutritionfacts.org/testimonials.
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please go to the Nutrition Facts Podcast landing page.
There you’ll find all the detailed information you need –
plus links to all of the sources we cite for each of these topics.
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