Eating Less Meat Could Take Out 8 Million Cars of the Road: New Study Puts Things Into Perspective

What would happen if you and everyone around you ate less meat? A new study from Oxford University says you could take out 8 million cars off the road in the UK alone.

Of course, that would mean most people would reduce their meat intake. Still, the numbers from this new study really put things into perspective.

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The study calculated how many greenhouse gasses are produced by people’s food consumption and compared them with the ones generated by cars. Here is how your diet affects carbon dioxide levels:

“What makes this assessment different is that it takes real people’s diets and is based on the various production methods we have at the moment. The researchers have assessed at a much more granular level than has been done before the environmental footprint of what they are eating,” Prof Susan Jebb, the head of the Food Standards Agency, who was not involved in this study, told the BBC.

As for how the study was made, it involved a generous sample size.

55,000 people in the UK were surveyed over their dietary habits and divided into multiple categories: big meat-eaters (who ate more than 100g of meat per day), low meat-eaters (whose daily intake was 50g or less), fish-eaters (pescetarians), vegetarians, and vegans.

Even more impactful, the study released a chart showing how much land is involved in growing your food, depending on what you eat.

High meat eaters need more than 16 sqm of land per day to support their dietary habits, while, at the other end of the scale, vegans only require a bit over 4sqm.

As you can see from these charts, even small dietary changes could have a tremendous impact on the environment, not to mention on your health. You can read the full study in Nature Food if you want to learn more.

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