Environmental Impact Based on Various Dietary Patterns

The European Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a research article conducted by L. Baroni, L. Cenci, M. Tettamanti and M. Berati discussing the impact of different dietary patterns and food productions including conventional farming and organic agriculture has on the environment.

The argument for environmental degradation includes:

• The food shortage and malnutrition problems are primarily related to rapidpopulation growth in the world and to the declining per capita availability of land, water and energy resources. On the other hand, advances in technology have alsoallowed dramatic output increases in modern agriculture. With these improvements, the environmental impact of food production and consumption has also increased.
• In particular, recent studies show that plant-based diets are environmentally better than meat-based diets

The study involves comparing:

• omnivorous diets, based on products derived from conventional farming and non-organic agriculture;
  

• omnivorous diets, based on products derived from organic farming and agriculture;
  

• vegetarian/vegan diets, based on products derived from conventional farming and non-organic agriculture;
  

• vegetarian/vegan diets, based on products derived from organic farming and agriculture.
  

The findings included

1. Beef is the single food with the greatest impact on the
environment

If animals are considered as ‘food production machines’,
these machines turn out to be extremely polluting, to have a
very high consumption and to be very inefficient. When
vegetables are transformed into animal proteins, most of the
proteins and energy contained in the vegetables are wasted;
the vegetables consumed as feed are used by the animals for
their metabolic processes, as well as to build non-edible
tissue like bones, cartilage, offal and faeces.

2. The other high impacting foods are cheese, fish and milk

Origin: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~choucc/environmental_impact_of_various_dietary_patterns.pdf