Vegan diets healthier for planet, people than meat diets

innovations report

This is one of the more thorough articles I've seen on the report by University of Chicago’s Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin. In a bid to make their findings more accessible to the general public, they are clear to state they don't judge people for their eating habits, and offer that improvements to one's diet in the direction of veganism can still have a real impact:

"We say that however close you can be to a vegan diet and further from the mean American diet, the better you are for the planet. It doesn’t have to be all the way to the extreme end of vegan. If you simply cut down from two burgers a week to one, you’ve already made a substantial difference."

Looking at the problem from an exclusively environmental view, their findings confirmed what many of us already knew, or at least strongly suspected:

In their study, Eshel and Martin compared the energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions that underlie five diets: average American, red meat, fish, poultry and vegetarian (including eggs and dairy), all equaling 3,774 calories per day.

The vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient, followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient.

Eat lower on the food chain, right? This, of course, is also good for one's health, and it's nice to see that mentioned as well:

"The adverse effects of dietary animal fat intake on cardiovascular diseases is by now well established. Similar effects are also seen when meat, rather than fat, intake is considered," Martin and Eshel wrote. "To our knowledge, there is currently no credible evidence that plant-based diets actually undermine health; the balance of available evidence suggests that plant-based diets are at the very least just as safe as mixed ones, and most likely safer."

It's nice to know a vegetarian diet can go a long way toward saving the planet, but when you tie it to individual health, you may get people concerned not just for their children's world, but their own lives.

Tags: environmental | health | vegetarian | vegan