Study: Vegetarian Diets Are Way Worse For The Environment

Here’s something counter-intuitive: vegetarianism and other diets could be worse for the environment than previously thought.

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers published a new study claiming following federal government’s dietary guidelines may cause more environmental harm than experts previously thought based on the amount of resources and greenhouse gas emissions associated with each calorie of food consumed.

Researchers examined the environmental impacts of growing, distributing and storing foods the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says should be part of a “healthy” diet — basically eating lots of fruits, vegetables, dairy and fish, while cutting meat consumption.

“Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think,” Fischbeck says. “Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken.”

CMU researchers found that while simply eating less without following USDA guidelines lessens your environmental impact, switching up your diet to follow USDA healthy food guidelines “increases energy use by 43 %, blue water footprint by 16 %, and GHG emissions by 11 %.”

Source.

Treehuggers are killing the planet. :(

Mhm. Right, sure.. Gotcha ya! Burgers good, apple bad.

"Eggplant, celery and cucumbers...."

What about meat substitutes like soy beans and stuff? I'm a meat eater, but they don't really sem all that credible.

Yeah, and animal agriculture, which takes up nearly 30% of the Earth's land mass, isn't? One gallon of milk takes on average 683 gallons of water to produce. A 300g steak takes about 3,000 gallons of water to produce. There are too many humans on the planet and the systematic slaughter of animals is destroying our planet faster than all transportation combined.

Nothing worse than the methane release from the cattle industry.

That said, vegetarian diets are bad for the body. Heavily increase the risk of osteoporosis.

Really depends where you're getting your food.

And people think it's just cow farts. It's not just cow farts. It's the fact that livestock don't have the benefit of treated waste like humans do. And there are more than 1.4 billion of them defecating every day. That is a TON of methane.

Also, osteoporosis has nothing to do with a vegetarian diet. I'm vegan and there are plenty of ways to get calcium, magnesium and vitamin D. There's kale, almond milk, soybeans, calcium-set tofu, broccoli, okra...

It's not, and it's a common trick. Basically they are putting up the highest caloric meats vs the lowest calorie dense vegetables. Vegetarians are not replacing meat with lettuce and cucumbers, and it's not like steak eaters aren't eating salads either. A better comparison would be against soy beans and other protein rich/calorie dense vegetables that vegetarians use to replace their meat intake. Just to make it even clearer, you would have to eat 7+ pounds of lettuce to get the same calories as 6oz of pork. Who the **** is eating 7 pounds of lettuce a day and who is replacing their meat intake with lettuce? It's ridiculous.

I'm a meat eater, just FYI. Also, I haven't read the actual study (it's behind a pay wall) but according to some commentators that have the headlines that the news agencies are running with are misleading. Certain low calorie density vegetables are worse than meat calorie-to-calorie...but the study concluded that overall a vegetarian diet is better.

I think I heard about this a long time ago.

How could you reveal the truth. Something about veggies felt counter intuitive. McDonalds may actually be a 'good' meal

I will keep the burgers until I hear more information.

This is one of the dumbest threads I have ever seen.

"As it turns out, pork and poultry emits less emissions than some fruits and vegetables when ranked based on greenhouse gas emissions per calorie." But that's not taking into the account that animals have to be fed. Meaning that when you eat meat you're still eating plants, you're just letting the animal consume the plants first. So the argument of plants vs. meat is technically plants vs. a crapton of plants, there is no way the latter will ever be more environmentally efficient. It's tragic that this article would postulate such an obvious lie.

"'The claim that vegetarianism is kinder to the planet also fails to consider a couple of kinds of meat that aren’t on the Environmental Working Group’s chart,' Haspel writes. 'Deer and Canada geese do active damage in the areas where they’re overpopulated, and wild pigs leave destruction in their path wherever they go. Eat one of those, and do the planet a favor.'" Yes, I'm sure everyone reading this article hunts Canada geese on a regular basis, or knows how to skin a deer. And I'm sure it's common for restaurants to serve wild animals. (excluding fish) What a pointless argument..

P.S. everyone reading this, go to YouTube and search 'high speed slaughter'. Then ask yourself how much you feel like a damn Captain Planet by eating bacon.

While the mass-farming of certain things (rice in CA, expensive/impractical heirloom varieties of vegetables that should be extinct, etc) can have a negative impact on the environment, I can't see how they are more harmful than the raising of livestack; factory-ranches generally put off an insane amount of gas, while the expansion of grazing land takes away thousands of acres of forest every day in south america.

There is room for both, though, if we just moderate our animal protein intake, and stop growing crops to excess for export. Soil erosion, pest/disease resistance, etc are serious problems.

Osteoporosis rates in vegetarians is significantly higher than omnivores.

This is ridiculous. Do they even understand about the ridiculous amount of plant product a single cow must consume before maturity? The article is complete rubbish.

I'm not a vegetarian but I'm highly sceptical of this report.

For everyone saying the report is rubbish, the devil is in the details.

"Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think,” Fischbeck says. “Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."

Celery is almost nothing but fiber and water. It's caloric content is virtually non-existent.

Yeah, I'd definitely like to see how they quantify meat production (i.e. counting the production and consumption of the veggies eaten by the animals as well), but it's not something that can be dismissed out of hand. Grains can have a different impact than something like celery or almonds. Of course, a lot of livestock consume alfalfa as well and that requires quite a bit of water if I recall. There are actually a lot of considerations in such a calculation, and it would be interesting to see what was taken into account.

@mattbbpl: it is definitely something you can dismiss. There is no need for a calculator. Eating vegetables trumps cows eating vegetables by a strong six miles. Cows burn several, several thousands of calories a day over the course of the several years we spend raising them for the slaughter. Cows literally eat so many damn vegetables each and every day that they sit at an average weight of 2,000lbs of obese flesh, 2,000lbs from eating damn vegetables for crying out loud. You can't possibly have a lick of rational behind any of that nonsense.

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely suspect. But it depends on their calculation/vegetables used. Cows are fed mostly grains which are calorie rich, use less water than a lot of other vegetables, don't require refrigeration, etc. If you compare someone who eats a lot of "that cow" from a local source to a vegetarian who has specifically been estimated to eat a lot of calorie-poor, water-use heavy, poorly preservable vegetables that are shipped across the country and then stored for several days, then I could definitely see where their calculations could mathematically add up.

They'd likely be unrealistic, purposely rigged calculations, but they would still add up :-P

@shrek: Huh. OK then. Have a pleasant day!

lol. yeah, lets pretend vegan-ism exists.

if you are not taking supplements that come from animal sources you die.

that's how simple this is.

nobody has moral highground and everyone is basically culpable for the exact same shit.

get over yourselves because you are never going to get anywhere up there on that high horse lying to yourself about the nature of your biology.

it's the most dishonest shit that i can even imagine.

Lol yeah ok... who sponsored this article? American Meat Association?

All this vegans vs meat eaters bs couldn't be any more dull. I don't give a fvck about animals. As long as they taste good I'll keep eating them, even if my risk of decease or destroying the planet is higher. I don't plan to be here for too long anyway... and I also don't give a fvck about future generations.

Just the transportation of food across the country is a burden on the infrastructure and environment and contributes a lot to costs. Our entire strategic oil reserve in the US can be depleted in just a year if the entirety of it were used by the government to deliver food across the country. We need to develop new methods of localized urban farming and get rid of our outdated tilling the lands method, we also need to overhaul our department of agriculture to work toward implementing growth in domestic food production and technology and not funneling tax dollars to unproductive farms as a form of rural welfare or to stop giving subsidies to thriving industries because they have the money to lobby for it.

@foxhound_fox:

Meat and animal proteins in general have a much higher PRAL score (acidic environment potential) than any other digestible human food. When your body is in a more acidic state, calcium leeches off your bones to help balance pH. A plant based diet consists of foods that are alkaline and basic, which allows your body to sit comfortably in a balanced pH, which keeps your bones strong and cells can function and replicate with fewer errors.

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/acid-base

PRAL Scores of various food groups:

I'll take a wild guess and assume you haven't taken a single college-level physics or chemistry course in your life. Cause if you did and you can't figure out what's wrong with your numbers on your own, we'd have a huge problem of professors passing students who don't understand jack shit of their courses on top of pollution.

@PinkiePirate: It has been four months since the previous response. This thread is being closed.