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The food we consume has a massive impact on our planet.

Agriculture takes up half the habitable land on Earth, destroys forests and other ecosystems, and produces a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Meat and dairy specifically account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

So changing what we eat can help reduce carbon emissions and promote sustainable farming. But there are several “climate-friendly” diets to choose from. The best known are the completely plant-based vegan diet, the vegetarian diet (which also allows eggs and dairy) and the pescetarian diet (which also allows seafood).

There are also “flexitarian” diets, where three-fourths of meat and dairy is replaced by plant-based food, or the Mediterranean diet which allows moderate amounts of poultry, pork, lamb and beef.

Which diet should you choose?

Let’s start with a new fad: the climatarian diet. One version was created by the not-for-profit organization Climates Network, which says this diet is healthy, climate friendly and nature friendly. According to the publicity, “with a simple diet shift you can save a tonne of CO₂ equivalents per person per year” (“equivalents” just means methane and other greenhouse gases are factored in alongside carbon dioxide).

Meat, especially highly processed meat, has been linked to a string of major health issues including high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer.

Sounds great, but the diet still allows you to eat meat and other high-emission foods such as pork, poultry, fish, dairy products and eggs. So this is just a newer version of the “climate carnivore” diet except followers are encouraged to switch as much red meat (beef, lamb, pork, veal and venison) as possible to other meats and fish.

The diet does, however, encourage you to cut down on meat overall and to choose responsibly produced and local meat where possible, in addition to avoiding food waste and consuming seasonal, local foods.

So saving a tonne of carbon dioxide is great but switching to vegetarianism or veganism can save even more. A Western standard meat-based diet produces about 7.2 kilograms of CO₂ equivalent per day, while a vegetarian diet produces 3.8 kg and a vegan diet 2.9 kg. If the whole world went vegan, it would save nearly 8 billion tonnes CO₂equivalent — while even a switch to the Mediterranean diet would still save 3 billion tonnes. That is a saving of between 20 and 60 percent of all food emissions, which are currently at 13.7 billion tonnes of CO₂equivalent a year.

Here’s how much CO2e (in billions of tonnes, or Gt) would be saved if the whole world switched to each of these diets. Terms as defined by CarbonBrief. Data: IPCC, author provided

Plant-based diets can save water and land — and they’re healthier

To save our planet, we must also consider water and land usage. Beef, for instance, needs about 15,000 liters of water per kilo to produce. Some vegetarian or vegan foods like avocados and almonds also have a huge water footprint, but overall a plant-based diet has about half the water consumption of a standard meat-based diet.

A global move away from meat would also free up a huge amount of land, since billions of animals would no longer have to be fed. Soy, for instance, is one of the world’s most common crops, yet almost 80 percent of the world’s soybeans are fed to livestock.

The reduced need for agricultural land would help stop deforestation and help protect biodiversity. The land could be used to reforest and rewild large areas, which would become a natural store of carbon dioxide.

One study suggests a move to a global plant-based diet could reduce global mortality by up to 10 percent by 2050.

What’s more, a plant-based diet is generally healthier. Meat, especially highly processed meat, has been linked to a string of major health issues, including high blood pressure, heart disease and cancer. One study suggests that a move to a global plant-based diet could reduce global mortality by up to 10 percent by 2050.

However, meat, dairy and fish are the main sources of some essential vitamins and minerals such as calcium, zinc, iodine and vitamin B12. A strict vegan diet can put people at risk of deficiencies unless they can have access to particular foods or take supplements. Yet both supplements and vegan food products are too expensive or difficult for many people around the world to access, and it would be hard to scale up supplement production to provide for billions of extra people.

So a climatarian or flexitarian approach means there are fewer health risks but it still allows people to exercise choice.

We slaughter around nine animals per person per year — even though the same nutrients can come from plants

One issue that seems to be missing from many food discussions is the ethical dimension. Every year we slaughter 69 billion chickens, 1.5 billion pigs, 0.65 billion turkeys, 0.57 billion sheep, 0.45 billion goats and 0.3 billion cattle for food worldwide. That is over nine animals killed for every person on the planet per year — all for the nutrition and protein that we know can come from a plant-based diet.

Poultry production has almost doubled this century, as chicken has raced ahead of pork and beef. Our World In Data / data: FAO, CC BY-SA

So what is the ideal global diet to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce habitat destruction and help you live longer?

Well, I suggest being an “ultra-flexitarian,” a diet of mostly plant-based foods but one that allows meat and dairy products in extreme moderation, with red and processed meat completely banned. This would save at least 5.5 billion tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year (or 40 percent of all food emissions), decrease global mortality by 10 percent, and prevent the slaughter of billions of animals.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Watch these TED-Ed videos to learn more about how our diets and food production affect the planet: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Maslin PhD is a Professor of Earth System Science at University College London and the Natural History Museum of Denmark. He is a co-founder of the leading AI geospatial analytics company Rezatec Ltd and he was a Royal Society Industrial Fellow. He is science advisor to Transition Lab, Sopra-Steria, Net Zero Now, and Sheep Inc. He is member of Cheltenham Science Festival Advisory Committee. Maslin is a leading scientist with particular expertise in past and future global and regional climatic change and has publish over 185 papers in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Climate Change, The Lancet and Geology. He has been awarded research council, charity and Government research and postgraduate training grants of over £75 million. Professor Maslin has presented over 50 public talks over the last three years for example: Twitter (EU/Asia), New Scientist Live, Guardian ‘Master Classes’, Google (UK), Global Leaders Forum (South Korea), RGS, Royal Society, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Hay literature festival, Harvard, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge Universities etc. He has supervised 15 Research fellows, 20 PhD students and over 60 MSc students. He has also have written 10 popular books, over 80 popular articles (e.g., The Conversation, New Scientist, Geographical magazine, The Times, Independent and Guardian), appeared on radio and television (including Timeteam, Newsnight, Dispatches, Horizon, The Today Programme, Briefing Room, BBC News, Channel 5 News, and Sky News). He was also one of the key presenters of Sir David Attenborough’s BBC One ‘Climate Change: The Facts’. His books include the high successful ‘Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction’ (OUP, 2021), ‘The Cradle of Humanity’ (OUP, 2019), ‘The Human Planet: How we created the Anthropocene’ co-authored with Simon Lewis (Penguin, 2018) and ‘How to save our planet: the facts’ (Penguin, 2021). Maslin was also a co-author of the 2009 Lancet report ‘Managing the health effects of climate change’ and a contributor the annual Lancet Commission on climate change and global health. Prof. Maslin was included in Who’s Who for the first time in 2009 and was granted a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for the study of early human evolution in East Africa in 2011. He is currently the Co-Director of the London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership.

Jenice Kim

Here are three common-sense tips to help you feed your hunger and not your emotions, from dietician Eve Lahijani.

Imagine if eating were as simple as, say, refueling a car. You’d fill up only when an indicator nudged towards E, you couldn’t possibly overdo it or else your tank would overflow, and you’d never, ever dream of using it as a treat.

Instead, for many of us, eating is anything but straightforward. What starts out as a biological necessity quickly gets entangled with different emotions, ideas, memories and rituals. Food takes on all kinds of meanings — as solace, punishment, appeasement, celebration, obligation – and depending on the day and our mood, we may end up overeating, undereating or eating unwisely.

It’s time for us to rethink our relationship with food, says Eve Lahijani, a Los Angeles-based dietician and a nutrition health educator at UCLA. She offers three common-sense steps to help get there.

1. Reconnect with your hunger.

So many things drive us to eat — it’s noon and that means lunchtime, it’s midnight and that means snack time, we’re happy, we’re anxious, we’d rather not bring home leftovers, we’re too polite to say no, we’re bored, and oh, wow, has someone brought in donuts?!?

Similarly, we suppress our appetite for a myriad of reasons — we’re too busy, we’re sad, we’re mad, nobody else is eating, it’s too early, it’s too late, we’re too excited.

Now try doing this: Eat only when you’re hungry; stop when you’re full. “It may seem obvious to you,” concedes Lahijani. Still, think over your past week: How many times did you eat when you weren’t hungry?

She suggests that we think about our hunger and our fullness on a 0-10 scale, with 0-1 being famished and 9-10 being painfully stuffed (as in holiday-dinner stuffed). She says, “You want to begin eating when you first get hungry, and that correlates with the three or a four on the scale and [to stop] … when you first get comfortably full, a six or seven on the scale.”

The reason you shouldn’t wait until you’re starving (or, 0-2 on the scale) is because that’s when people tend to make nutritionally unsound choices. If you’ve ever gone to the supermarket when you were ravenous, you probably didn’t fill up your cart with produce; you gravitated towards the high-calorie, super-filling items.

Lahijani says, “It’s also wise to eat when you first get hungry because you’re more likely to enjoy your food [and] you’re more likely to eat mindfully … When you let yourself get too hungry, chances are, you’re eating really fast and not really paying attention. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of overeating is letting yourself get too hungry in the first place.”

2. Feed your body what it is craving.

When Lahijani was a stressed-out college and graduate student, her eating took one of two forms: she was either dieting or bingeing. As she says: “Whenever I was on a diet, the diet told me what to eat,”; while on a binge, she’d eat whatever was convenient or go all out on foods forbidden by her then-diet. Developing a different relationship with food meant stepping out of those patterns. “Instead of listening to others’ opinions of what I should eat, I became silent and I tuned into my own body,” she says. “I fed my body what it was craving.”

It turns out Lahijani didn’t crave junk food. She says, “I was actually tasting things for the first time, because my mind wasn’t filled with judgment and guilt. I actually found that my body actually craved nurturing, nourishing foods like vegetables and fruits. I actually liked my sister’s kale and quinoa salad.”

3. Try not to use food as a reward or a punishment.

It’s not surprising that we do this. After all, as children, we quickly learn that rejoicing and parties come with cake, while transgressions result in … no cake. But one of the great things about being an adult is, we can establish our own associations. By all means, let’s continue to mark our birthdays with cake — or with fresh fruit and a stockpot of homemade veggie chili if that’s what you prefer. Or, celebrate in ways that have nothing to do with eating. You can set your own rules now.

When Lahijani’s fraught feelings about food eased, she was surprised to find these effects go beyond eating. “What’s really interesting is to see how making peace with food affected other areas of my life. As I learned how to listen to myself, I became better at listening to others, I became more empathetic,” she says. “As I made a point to trust myself, I became more trusting in my relationships and more vulnerable, and as I became more loving to myself … I learned what it meant to love someone else.”

Watch her TEDxUCLA talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daryl Chen is the Ideas Editor at TED.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Cari Vander Yacht

If we want the people in our lives to put down their steak knives and seriously consider changing their diets, we need to change the conversations we’re having with them, says food innovator Bruce Friedrich. Here’s what to say — and what not to say.

We can’t stop eating meat. Global consumption averages 94.8 pounds per person a year, and it’s expected to increase as much as 76 percent by 2050. In steak- and burger-loving countries such as Australia and the US, the average person eats between 220 and 240 pounds of meat and poultry a year.

Yet at the same time, researchers are increasingly aware of the serious consequences of our carnivorous diets. “In 2019 … 30 of the world’s leading scientists released the results of a massive three-year study into global agriculture and declared that meat production is destroying our planet and jeopardizing global health,” said Bruce Friedrich, cofounder and executive director of the Good Food Institute, an organization that supports the creation of plant-based and cell-based meat, in a TED Talk.

What’s more, eating meat has been shown to have a negative impact on personal health. A large-scale analysis found that a long-term diet of high amounts of red meat, particularly processed meat, is associated with an increased risk of mortality, cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In fact, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified processed meat as a human carcinogen due to its association with colorectal cancer, and WHO has classified red meat as “probably” carcinogenic because of its links to colorectal cancer.

Despite all the evidence, people aren’t putting down their double cheeseburgers, something that Friedrich, a TED Fellow, knows all too well. “Lots of people oppose the harms of industrial animal agriculture, but when they sit down to eat, they put their ethics to the side and they eat what is delicious and orderable,” he says.

So if we want people’s habits to change, then perhaps we need to change the conversations that we’re having with our families and friends about meat. “For 50 years, environmentalists, global health experts and animal activists have been begging the public to eat less meat,” said Friedrich in his TED Talk. “And yet, per capita meat consumption is as high as it’s been in recorded history.” That means it’s time to stop pleading (“If you really loved me or the planet, you’d go vegan”), demanding (“If you want to eat meat, you’re cooking every meal for yourself from now on!”), bribing (“I’ll let you listen to Ed Sheeran in the car if you do this”), or cornering them (“Surprise! Instead of steak Sundays, I decided we’re doing tofu stir-fry Sundays!”).

Whether it’s your steak-loving partner or parent or your tween cousin who lives on chicken nuggets, here are 7 steps to take to persuade them to cut down on eating meat.

1. First things first: Have the conversation separate from the dinner table.

Let’s call the meat eater in your life “M.” The absolute worst time to engage M in a discussion like this is when they’ve got a forkful of roast beef or roast chicken en route to their mouths. Should you persist, your words will do nothing to kill their enthusiasm for meat — just you.

2. Avoid saying anything that might sound like you’re judging them.

M is no fool. They know it’s not good to eat too much meat, particularly red meat — and they should be eating more fruits and veggies, too. So when you broach this topic, they’ll immediately be on the defensive.

Often, meat eaters might feel like their whole life is being questioned when vegetarians and vegans speak to them about their habits. As vegan advocate Tobias Leenaert puts it in his blog The Vegan Strategist, “People will often feel that your behavior (i.e., your eating or being vegan) is an implicit condemnation of theirs (their eating meat).”

3. Instead of saying, “You should eat less meat” or “You need to stop eating meat,” focus on why you eat the way you do.

Start sentences with “I” statements to show you’re talking about your own decisions and the thinking behind them; you’re not criticizing them. Since you’re trying to have a conversation with them, pause and leave space for them to take in what you said, ask questions and make comments. Nobody, no matter what they eat, likes to be lectured.

You could say something like, “After I read about the connection between animal farming and climate change, I’ve started doing Meatless Mondays. It hasn’t been too hard, and I made the most delicious farro salad last week. I’ll make extra next time so you can try it too.”

4. Appeal to the values that drive them — not you.

In his research, Stanford University social psychologist Robb Willer has found it’s much more than political beliefs that are dividing liberals and conservatives — underneath their differences is a fundamental split in moral values. “Liberals tend to endorse values like equality, fairness and care and protection more than conservatives do,” he explained in a TED Talk. “And conservatives tend to endorse values like loyalty, patriotism, respect for authority, and purity more than liberals do.”

If M is conservative, you might touch upon values like purity and patriotism when you’re talking about a low- or no-meat diet. The animals raised on factory farms are a far and freakish cry from what people ate 20 or 50 years ago; they’ve been specially engineered to yield the maximum amount of meat. Friedrich says, “If you asked your average consumer, ‘Would you want to eat a chicken who grew six times as quickly as chickens would naturally grow, due to genetic manipulation?’ I would guess that just about everybody would say no.”

There’s another important way in which mass agriculture has resulted in unnatural animals: widespread antibiotic use. “Most of the antibiotics produced globally are fed to farm animals — not because they’re sick but because feeding them antibiotics makes them grow more quickly,” says Friedrich. “And because feeding them antibiotics will allow them to live through conditions which would otherwise cause massive numbers of them to die.”

And if M is a liberal, you can speak about the environmental toll of large-scale farms – deforestation, air and water pollution, a warmer planet – and how many of these impacts are felt most by people who are already financially and physically vulnerable.

5. Position meatless food products as an addition or alternative to what they’re eating, not a replacement.

Unless they’re primed for change, a confirmed carnivore like M won’t embrace a vegan lifestyle after a single conversation — or many conversations.  That’s completely OK, and make sure they know you don’t expect them to. But they could begin adding, say, quinoa burgers with avocado tzatziki to their regular meal rotation and see if they like it.

6. Tell them that a shift away from meat is a change that is here to stay — all the big meat companies are on board.

The meat industry is rapidly changing, and plant-based meat — such as the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat — is gaining popularity. Showing this is not a fleeting trend but a major shift, the world’s three biggest meat producers — JBS, Tyson, and Cargill — are rebranding as “protein” companies rather than “meat” companies. Both JBS and Tyson manufacture plant-based alternatives, and Tyson and Cargill are investing in cell-based meat (i.e., meat that’s cultured in a lab rather than raised on a farm) as well.

Many fast-food outlets provide meat-free alternatives, too. Burger King and White Castle have begun selling some form of the Impossible Burger; outlets of A&W, Carl’s, Tim Horton and Dunkin Donuts offer Beyond Meat products.

Although plant-based meat is currently pricier than conventional meat, the cost is expected to go down as demand and competition rise. Soon, according to Friedrich, plant-based meat will be cheaper than traditional meat.

7. On the horizon: Cell-based meat that’s just like the real thing.

And if M remains unconvinced, tell them that cell-based meat is coming soon. It’s made from actual meat cells, so it will look and taste just like the meat they currently eat. However, it will be produced in facilities in ways that avoid many of the problems associated with traditional meat farming and processing.

Friedrich predicts that cell-based meat should be available to consumers in limited quantities in two to three years. Its existence could be the game-changer that ends the need for any such conversations with M, once and for all. “We will produce products that people want to buy, and we will make it the default choice, a choice that is better for health, the environment and animals,” Friedrich says.

Watch Bruce Friedrich’s TED Talk now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caitlin Wolper is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vulture, Slate, MTV News and Vox, among others. Her first poetry chapbook, Ordering Coffee in Tel Aviv, was published in October by Finishing Line Press. She uses lots of exclamation points at @CaitlinWolper.

This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.