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The World Resources Institute says you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to bid burgers bye-bye in order to reduce the environmental footprint of what you eat. For Americans, cutting back on beef (but not eliminating it altogether) could go a long way, it says.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n iStockphoto<\/p>\n Earth Day got you thinking about how your diet impacts the planet?<\/p>\n The World Resources Institute has news to ease a meat-lover\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s conscience: In a new report, it says you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to bid burgers bye-bye in order to reduce the environmental footprint of what you eat. Cutting back could go a long way, it says.<\/p>\n In the report, the nonprofit calculates the planetary effect of various possible changes in how the world eats.<\/p>\n According to the WRI, the planetary impact of Americans\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 meat and dairy habit accounts for nearly 90 percent of all the land used to feed us \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and 85 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from our diet.<\/p>\n The average American man eats almost 100 grams of protein a day \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and a lot of that protein comes from meat and dairy. As we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve reported, many American teen boys and men consume even more. <\/strong><\/p>\n According to Janet Ranganathan and her colleagues at WRI, if Americans slashed their intake of proteins from all animals \u00e2\u20ac\u201c beef, dairy, lamb, poultry and pork \u00e2\u20ac\u201c by 50 percent, it would have a dramatic impact. The amount of land required to feed us, and the resulting greenhouse gas emissions, are only a little more than if the whole country went vegetarian, says Ranganathan.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was surprised at that \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a vegetarian,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she tells me. In part, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because most vegetarians substitute dairy for meat in their diet.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So instead of having two slices of ham, you have one slice of ham or beef,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Ranganathan, the institute\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s vice president for science and research. Or you could switch to chicken, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153which [is a] much more efficient sources of protein.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n In a statement, the American Meat Institute called the WRI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s report \u00e2\u20ac\u0153riddled with factual flaws about protein consumption and, in turn, the environmental impact of balanced diets that include meat.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Full statement is here.)<\/p>\n Despite such criticisms, the WRI says according to its models, if everyone in heavy meat-eating countries \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s folks in U.S., Canada, Europe and Brazil \u00e2\u20ac\u201c cut back on animal protein, so that their total intake of protein (from plants and animals) was 60 grams a day, that could potentially save up to 1.6 billion acres of land from going into agricultural use. As Raganthan notes, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an area of land roughly twice the size of India.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Of course, this kind of global cutback on meat and dairy sounds like an incredibly ambitious scenario. But according to WRI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s modeling, a less dramatic shift in diet \u00e2\u20ac\u201d just cutting back on beef \u00e2\u20ac\u201c could still have a planetary impact.<\/p>\n That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because, per unit of edible protein, beef production requires a lot more land, and results in lots more greenhouse gas emissions, than plant protein sources like beans and lentils. (In part, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because the need for pastureland drives deforestation in places like the Brazilian Amazon.)<\/p>\n So if Americans ate about one-third less beef in their diet, and either replaced it with chicken or pork or with more beans and other legumes, that would still shrink their diet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s environmental footprint, according to WRI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s models: Both the amount of land used to feed us and the greenhouse gas emissions generated by our diet would go down by about 15 percent.<\/p>\n While cutting back meat consumption by 33 percent sounds very ambitious, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not unprecedented. Between 1976 to and 1993, American\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s per capita beef consumption dropped by 30 percent, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Economic Research Service.<\/p>\n But American habits can be hard to budge. In December 2015, our polling found many Americans are eating no less meat than they were three years earlier. And according to a report from the USDA on long-term projections, beef consumption is expected to rise slightly, but steadily over the next several years.<\/p>\n Of course, plant-based foods can take a toll on the environment, too: Almonds have been linked to a lot of water use. And last year, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that, on a per calorie basis, eating lettuce can produce more greenhouse gases than eating bacon.<\/p>\n As Carnegie Mellon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Paul Fischbeck, one of that study\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s authors, told The Huffington Post last December, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There are no simple answers to complex problems. Diet and the environmental impact of agriculture \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 is not a simple problem.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n He added: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t lump all vegetables together and say they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re good. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t lump all meat together and say it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bad.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" i The World Resources Institute says you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to bid burgers bye-bye in order to reduce the environmental footprint of what you eat. For Americans, cutting back on beef (but not eliminating it altogether) could go a long way, it says. iStockphoto hide caption toggle caption iStockphoto The World Resources Institute says you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}