By Saya Norm
It’s been a harsh summer in the northern hemisphere. People literally died of the heat during the past few weeks. There were about 16 per cent more deaths in the UK than normal for that time. Elsewhere, there has been immense climate-related suffering horrific heat waves in India and China, and devastating floods in Pakistan, China and Uganda.
About everyone got the message by now combatting climate change is not something we can put off until the future - it is already starting to bite when it comes to putting some teeth behind our actions, however, what kind of diet might help?
What is the most climate-friendly diet and what is the trade-off of malnourishment?
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a plant-based diet is the biggest behavioural shift a person can make to reduce their individual greenhouse-gas emissions. Food choice falls into the “ shift” rather than “avoid” category, because the global food system is responsible for about a quarter of human emissions.
But the exact definition of the term” plant-based” is still unclear. To some people, it means cutting out all animal products, but to many, it encompasses a low-meat diet. It can mean vegan, vegetarian or flexitarian. Whatever the rules do, the plant-based food-eating society is booming. Vegetarians have increased from seven to nine per cent over the past year, while those declaring themselves are up from two to five per cent. Nearly a third of the surveyed want to eat less meat, whereas seven per cent plan to eat more.
Australians are the world’s biggest red meat and milk consumers, outpacing even high-income North Americans. People in South Asian countries eat, on average about a 20th of typical red meat intake. Red meat sits at the pinnacles of greenhouse-gas-producing foods. Beef consistently leads the pack, followed by lamb, processed meats, pork and cheese. Milk in its unprocessed form falls lower on the scale. But product emissions depend on how they are produced.
Research shows that cutting out meat still significantly lowers diet-related emissions. A University of Otago study found that compared with most European diets, vegetarianism cut emissions by 30 per cent and veganism by 33 per cent. Another study showed that meatless but dairy-rich fare cut dietary emissions by nearly a quarter. A century from now, when the eater will have died, the methane emissions associated with will have largely finished exerting their powerful warming effect and broken down.
However, if younger generations keep eating meat, they’re likely to keep methane levels elevated. The important message is that changing your diet to reduce your meat intake can significantly reduce dietary emissions. As with all trends, individual changes may not make a huge difference on their own, but collectively they have a multiplier effect. And they can also have important ramifications for other issues, such as land use, health, and animal welfare.
Land use matters because if people can be fed from the land, there’s more space to restore or preserve native forests and wetlands. Those ecosystems sequester more carbon than land comparatively denuded for agriculture or crops. Because it takes a lot of land to feed cattle, beef production is considered particularly tough on the environment, regardless of whether the cattle graze pasture or are fed crop and crop residues. Such calculations also rate a portion of food as more climate-friendly if its production is more intensive and therefore spares land. However, this assumes that freed-up land is actually used for carbon-sequestering ecosystems.
There are other consequences to eating less meat that are so positive and it’s crazy not to consider it. For most people in the developed world, eating less meat is a good idea. Moreover, cutting back on meat lessens the harmful effects on health. Most studies show vegetarian, vegan and low-meat diets reduce the risk of developing what most Westerners die of cardiovascular disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes.
The evidence from numerous studies showed that a decrease in meat consumption in many countries would benefit both human and planetary health. All the food and nutrition guidelines being developed in countries around the world are shifting their emphasis towards a plant-based diet and reducing the consumption of meat. Diet is by far the biggest risk factor in the world for disease and early death. Diets high in salt. , sugar and low in fruits and vegetables account for about 18 per cent of disease outbreaks and that’s twice the impact of tobacco.
The global food system is responsible for human and environmental health*”syndemic”. Of the types of food that have health impacts,ultra-processed foods are the worst. Sugar, confectionery, French fries and chocolate biscuits are plant-based but definitely not whole foods.
Plant-based needs to be qualified as whole foods. A massive amount of international data showed that a diet high in red meat is, indeed, a risk factor for disease and early death. Processed meat is the worst.
When people reduce meat, they typically eat far more plant-based foods if they can choose healthy options. Those food productions come at. A much lower greenhouse gas cost than red meat, but sometimes uses more water. Research of Otago showed that vegetarianism and especially veganism, cut diet-related emissions.
When we change the average diet towards a low-emission one, we are not only changing the intake of dietary risk factors but also planetary health.
Moving towards a more plant-based diet is a no-brainer. But it has to be a gradual shift. If we had meat every day, for example, shift to one day a week without it, then two, then three. One thing is clear without targeted efforts to reduce food-related emissions, it will become impossible to restrain global heating within the” safe limit” – even if we rapidly reduce fossil fuel use and achieve global net zero carbon dioxide emission by the middle of the century. It depends on us real-time implementation. If we all do wish, we can do it.
