If you pride yourself on being a meat lover, it may be time to reconsider your carnivorous ways. In a series of papers on health and climate change (coming just ahead of next month's Copenhagen conference on climate change), British and Australian researchers suggested that cutting back on meat consumption would not only be beneficial to the earth, but improve health among people in meat-loving countries as well.
Although we may not give it much thought while we're wandering the aisles of the grocery store, when it comes to the environment, the biggest contributor of greenhouse gases is livestock farming. And in addition to the harm that meat production does to the planet, meat consumption is taking its toll on our health, too. According to researchers, "Livestock products are a source of some essential nutrients, [but] they provide large amounts of saturated fat, which is a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease."
If being more eco-friendly and lowering your risk of heart disease aren't enough to make you step away from the steak, chew on this: the study found that in Britain, decreasing meat consumption by as much as 30 percent could mean avoiding as many as 18,000 premature deaths in a single year.
But researchers admit that convincing people to cut back on meat consumption will be a challenge: "Although likely to yield benefits to health, such a strategy will probably encounter cultural, political, and commercial resistance, and face technical challenges," they said. "Coordinated intersectoral action is needed across agricultural, nutritional, public health, and climate change communities worldwide to provide affordable, healthy, low-emission diets for all societies."
The head of the research series, Professor Sir Andy Haines, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, provides more information on the group's findings in this short video.
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