 Agriculture has a significant effect on greenhouse gases. What foods and diets are best for reducing that impact? Check it out. Our eating habits are making us and the planet increasingly unhealthy. Ours is a lose-lose situation. 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, quote, 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 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 two 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, increasing 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. Here's to greenhouse gas emissions from various foods. 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, or beans with little peace to peace and lentils. For example, 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. Kindly 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 having the consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs would achieve up to 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 risk, reducing cardiovascular mortality, their leading cause of death. Note, however, that minimizing environmental impacts does not necessarily maximize human health. I mean yes, animal products, dairy, eggs, fish, and other meat release a 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, right? I mean 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. I mean, 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 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 that's some equal 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, you know, someone getting on your case for unnecessarily leaving on a light for 34 minutes, but this is a 34 hours, right? Just eating a different half cup of soup. And what was arguably the largest ever environmental protest in the world, more than a million children across more than 100 countries joined a global climate march demanding the government's 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 you put all those tweaks together, according to the Prestige Zeed Lancet Commission. 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%. 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, 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, maybe the optimal diet for the environment, but it's not all or nothing, even just cutting down on meat 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 runoff, smug eco-toxicity of the water and soil, and direct human toxicity of the air we breathe, water we drink, and the soil we grow our food from, eating eggs and dairy. Maybe nine times worse than plants, and eating eggs, dairy, and meat maybe 17 times worse than sticking to plant foods. Oh, and as a bonus, we can feed an extra 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's an overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and 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 campaigns that stalled meaningful efforts for decades. Certainly, environmental groups should know better, though. None of the highest-profile NGOs examined appear 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 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 lever to go even further. But they don't want to be seen as telling people what to do instead of 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.