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Environmental impacts of national diet recommendations
Researchers report the environmental impacts of adopting nationally recommended diets. Nationally recommended dietary guidelines (NRDs) are widely used to provide nutritional advice to the public. However, the environmental impacts of NRDs have received little attention. Paul Behrens and colleagues compared the estimated environmental impacts of average diets and nation-specific NRDs for nine middle-income and 28 high-income nations. For high-income nations, NRDs were associated with approximately 13–25% reduction in greenhouse gases (GHGs), 10–21% reduction in eutrophication, and 6–18% reduction in land use, compared with average diets. For upper-middle–income nations, the reduced environmental impacts associated with NRDs were smaller than for high-income nations: approximately 1–12% GHG reduction, 8–19% eutrophication reduction, and 7–19% land-use reduction. In two lower-middle–income nations—India and Indonesia—GHGs, eutrophication, and land use for NRDs were greater than for average diets by approximately 12–17%, 25–32%, and 9–15%, respectively. The authors estimate a net reduction of 0.19–0.53 Gt CO2 equivalents per year, 4.3–10.6 Gt phosphate equivalents per year, and 1.5–2.8 million km2 of land use if all the nations included in the study followed NRDs. Incorporation of environmental concerns in the development of NRDs could yield further environmental benefits, according to the authors.
Expert Reaction
These comments have been collated by the Science Media Centre to provide a variety of expert perspectives on this issue. Feel free to use these quotes in your stories. Views expressed are the personal opinions of the experts named. They do not represent the views of the SMC or any other organisation unless specifically stated.
Professor Brian Morris is from the School of Medical Sciences and Bosch Institute, at the University of Sydney
This new study finds that diets good for our health are also good for the health of our planet.
The study further documents the dire predictions if countries fail to drastically reduce consumption of the most prominent contributor to global warming – beef consumption – owing to the enormous amounts of methane that are released owing to the action of bacteria in the rumen of ruminant livestock needed by grazing cattle and sheep in order to digest the grasses they consume.
Currently one third of the planet’s arable land mass is given over to food production. Deforestation to produce beef is an increasing contributor.
Eating at the top of the food chain by humans is not only inefficient, it is bad for our health. National dietary advice, by high-income countries in particular, is to consume vegetable protein in preference to meat and other animal produce, as the latter are associated with greater prevalence of various cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Diets that are mostly vegetarian or completely vegan have been shown in thousands of research studies to lead to better health outcomes for humans.
Now the evidence is showing that a switch to vegetable diets will help slow global warming, so reducing that rate at which planet Earth is hurtling towards catastrophe and ultimately the extinction of species, including our own.
The results of the new study present a warning to us all. And Australia is mentioned several times.
Professor Mark L Wahlqvist AO is Emeritus Professor and Head of Medicine at Monash University and Monash Medical Centre. He is also Past President of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences
This is important confirmation of the role the food system and we can play in alleviating environmental damage and improving health outcomes.
Dr Pep Canadell, CSIRO Research Scientist, and Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project
Australia off the charts on environmental impacts due to its heavy meat-base diet; authors of the report had to truncate the bars showing environmental impacts of Australia’s average diet for 'ease of visualization', meaning the size of impact didn’t fit in the graph.
Which means Australia’s heavy meat diet is leading the world in atmospheric and water pollution.
This paper suggests that the recommendations are healthier for people and healthier for the environment; reducing the consumption is a win-win, and a must to reach the targets of the Paris Agreement to stabilize the climate system well below 2°C.
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