This Is How You Should Eat to Minimize Your Environmental Impact

As easy as it is to base your health status off of your eating habits or your workout routine, these factors represent only a sliver of your overall wellbeing. Financial security, employment, interpersonal relationships, and education can all influence your state of health too, and as the globe gradually warms, it’s becoming clear that the environment can do the same. In fact, climate change can raise your risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease and cause acute and long-term mental health issues.

But it’s not a one-way street. The diet you follow — and in turn, the food that’s being produced to satisfy your cravings — has a direct impact on the health of the environment, says Jessica Fanzo, Ph.D., the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food Policy and Ethics at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet? “Global food production contributes some of the most substantive pressures on natural resources, ecosystems, and the overall Earth system,” she says. “Food systems contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, we’ve got issues with agrochemicals from animal agriculture, and we have food waste and food loss issues.”

In fact, the global food system is responsible for producing more than one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions (think: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated gases) that further global warming, and the United States alone creates 8.2 percent of those greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Food. One of the biggest global contributors is raising livestock — most specifically cattle — which creates 14.5 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Of course, all that meat has to go somewhere, and most often, it ends up on Americans’ plates. In the last four years, the United States has been ranked as the highest beef-consuming country, eating more than 31 percent more beef than the entire European Union annually, per the United States Department of Agriculture. In 2020, nearly 112 pounds of red meat and 113 pounds of poultry was consumed per capita in the United States, according to the National Chicken Council. That isn’t just a problem for the Earth: Long-term consumption of increasing amounts of red meat is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer, type 2 diabetes, and total mortality in both men and women, according to a review published in the International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research. Not to mention, 90 percent of Americans aren’t hitting the recommended daily intake of vegetables, and 80 percent aren’t eating enough fruit, according to the USDA. “Our diets are not sustainable, and they’re not healthy,” says Fanzo. “And diets present one of the top risk factors in morbidity and mortality.”

We don’t really have a choice if we want to save humanity and save the planet at the same time. We have to take action, and it has to be in this decade.

Reminder: All those greenhouse gases let sunlight pass through Earth’s atmosphere, but they also trap its heat, which creates a greenhouse effect that results in global warming, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. As the planet continues to warm, heatwaves are expected to become more intense and more frequent, sea levels will rise, hurricanes will become stronger, and risks of floods, wildfires, and droughts will increase, according to NASA.

And all this spells trouble for the system the world relies on for sustenance. “Specifically, from the food side, [if we take] a business-as-usual approach, we’re going to have significant food shortages and the nutritional content of crops will decline,” says Fanzo. “There’s a lot of modeling and projections of what will happen to the food system, and there will definitely be multiple bread basket failures, where big agriculture systems simultaneously fail.”

The warming climate plays a major role in these shortages. Research shows that that some staple crops in the U.S. — including corn, soybeans, and wheat — have higher yields when grown in temperatures ranging from 84.2 to 89.6°F, but they decrease sharply after temperatures hit that peak. In some regions of the world (like those in semi-arid climates), higher temperatures can shorten the growing season and reduce yield, as crops will hit their breaking point for high temperatures and low moisture levels, according to a 2015 USDA report on climate change and the food system. Milder winters — coupled with increasingly damaging severe weather events, higher temperatures, and increased humidity levels — also allow for pests and pathogens to grow, spread, and survive, which can potentially reduce yields. And as all the growth factors for crops continue to shift, agricultural production is likely to become even more unpredictable, per the report.

As the amount of food available drops, so does its nutritional quality. Elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have been shown to lower the protein content of wheat, rice, barley, and potatoes by up to 14 percent, and other mineral and micronutrient concentrations are likely to decrease as well, according to the USDA’s report. “We don’t really have a choice if we want to save humanity and save the planet at the same time,” says Fanzo. “We have to take action, and it has to be in this decade.”

The Body and Earth Benefits of a Planetary Health Diet

One action you can take right now: Adopting a planetary health diet. In 2019, 37 leading scientists from 16 different countries joined together to form the EAT-Lancet Commission, which would define exactly what a healthy diet and a sustainable food production system looks like, as well as the actions that need to be taken to create both on a global scale. After pouring over scientific literature, the commission developed strategies that would help create a future optimal for the health of the people *and* the planet, including shifts in agricultural production, food waste reduction, and — most importantly for the average citizen — the planetary health diet.

This dietary template, so to speak, emphasizes minimally processed foods and filling half your plate with fruits and vegetables, then loading the other half primarily with whole grains, plant-based proteins, unsaturated plant oils, and modest amounts (if any at all) of meat, fish, and dairy foods. IRL, the average person in the world would have to double their intake of fruits, veggies, legumes, and nuts, and cut their intake of red meat in half, according to the Commission’s report.

The reason behind this largely plant-based plate: “Beef is a significant contributor to methane, one of the greenhouse gasses,” explains Fanzo. “It’s a significant contributor to water use, land-use change [think: clearing a forest to raise livestock], and a lot of grains that we grow are feeding cattle as opposed to humans. They’re very resource-intensive animals.” Indeed, a 2019 study published in the journal Agriculture Systemsshowed that beef production in the U.S. releases more than 535 billion pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents (a unit of measurement that includes the atmospheric impact of all greenhouse gasses, not just CO2) each year. Do a little math wizardry, and that means every pound of beef produced creates a whopping 21.3 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents. On the flip side, a pound of beans emits just 0.8 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalents.

While cows create the lion’s share of the food system’s environmental footprint, other animal-based food products have a substantial impact as well, says Fanzo. The cheese you add to your charcuterie board uses 606 gallons of water per pound to make, for example, and each pound of lamb you stuff into your gyro released up to 31 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent while it was being raised.