Why eating meat is bad for the environment, climate and health: study

Although meat can be an important source of protein and nutrition, it also has a disadvantage, and there is much more than the obvious increased risk of certain types of diseases such as colorectal cancer – and that is a major global problem.

There are scientific reasons why meat is bad for our climate, environment, agriculture,

But researchers say people "do not know the scope and severity of environmental impacts of meat", especially compared to other dietary habits.

They also found that environmental sustainability is hardly a motivation to encourage people to stop eating meat because they are more concerned about their money and their health.

"Consumption of meat, at least when viewed from a global perspective, is one of the day-to-day behaviors harmful to the environment that humans perform," explains the researcher Garrett Lentz of the University of Otago.

"This is due to the wide range and severity of impacts associated with animal husbandry, including land and water degradation, loss of habitat and biodiversity; "Regardless of the factor of change, whether for environmental sustainability, improving public health or animal welfare, reducing meat consumption would result in a more efficient food system feed more of people with fewer resources, thus minimizing at least some of the associated environmental impacts that are seen today. "

Eating processed meat is associated with a higher risk of colorectal cancer, and processed meat and red can also increase

The new review, published in Science showed that switching from a meat-rich diet to a more plant-based diet could reduce mortality rates in the world of six to ten percent.

Oxford University researchers stated that even though confounding factors such as smoking and obesity were hard to grasp, large-scale studies conducted in Western countries They show how meat production has resulted in more greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy compared to foods of plant origin.

An example was private sector or non-governmental certification schemes, which provided reliable evidence of social or environmental standards

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The World Cancer Research Fund recommends that people who eat red meat consume less than 500 g per week, while the Global Burden of Disease project suggests that people consume no more than 100 g per day. week.