A new paper from Scarborough et al. looks again at the level of environmental impact that different types of food pattern consumptions have; everything from vegan through to high meat diets.
How this paper differs from some others I’ve seen in the past is that:
- It standardises the dietary intake of each person, hence ensuring that any observed differences aren’t a result of meat eaters simply consuming a different number of calories than vegans.
- It takes into account the fact that the environmental impact of a certain type of food can vary dramatically depending on how and where it is produced.
Nonetheless, the punchline is basically the same as more straightforward analyses show.
All environmental indicators showed a positive association with amounts of animal-based food consumed.
Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% (95% uncertainty interval, 15.1–37.0%) of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% (7.1–44.5%) for land use, 46.4% (21.0–81.0%) for water use, 27.0% (19.4–40.4%) for eutrophication and 34.3% (12.0–65.3%) for biodiversity.
At least 30% differences were found between low and high meat-eaters for most indicators.
Vegan diets were superior to high meat diets in every measure of environmental impact here. Whilst there is a lot of uncertainty on some measures due to not knowing how exactly each item of food was sourced, in no case at all is that uncertainty enough to make it remotely plausible that vegan diets actually aren’t superior on these measures.
Another repeated finding is that there’s good returns from simply cutting down one’s amount of meat consumption, or switching to fish. In today’s world it seems unlikely that everyone is going to seriously consider becoming vegan, but perhaps all of us that haven’t yet done so might consider reducing our meat consumption. It will help the planet.