What Diet Is Best for the Environment?

G’day,

Happy Monday. And thank you to all the readers that responded to our polls. We’ll now be able to shift our content slightly in order to make y’all happy.

If you’re wondering, the consensus seemed to be to keep these newsletters short and sweet, keep them at around three newsletters a week, and keep the content diverse. So that is what we are going to try and do.

You can now expect our newsletter every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with a focus on news, musings, and highlights about the food world.

Let’s keep growing together.

A recent study compared the carbon footprint of popular North American diets.

As you might of expected, it’s these damn keto people ruining everything (I’ll have a beer with my slice of pizza and side of noodles, thank you very much).

JK. The keto diet has its time and place and many people have benefited from it to varying degrees.

However, it does seem clear that diets that are meat and animal product-centred, are the number-one offenders when it comes to a person’s carbon footprint. After a study of 16000 US adults, researchers found that the keto diet creates 3kg of carbon dioxide for every 1000 calories consumed. While the paleo diet, which is generally a bit more heavy on plants and fruits, produces 2.6kg of carbon dioxide per 1000 calories.

On the other end of the diet spectrum, vegans generate 0.7kg of carbon for eating the same amount of calories.

Though we aren’t the diet morality police, the study does reiterate how impactful our food choices can be on the world around us.

34% of green house gas emissions come from the food system, with beef being responsible for 8-10 times more emissions than chicken, and chicken creating 20 times more emissions than nut and legume production.

Something to chew on.