Reducing consumption of red meat can cut chronic
disease risk and result in a decline of carbon footprint by 28 million
tonnes a year in the UK alone, a new study has claimed.
Research
published in the journal BMJ Open have found that by halving red and
processed meat consumption would not only prompt a fall in chronic
disease incidence of between 3 and 12 per cent in the UK, but its carbon
footprint would also shrink by 28 million tonnes a year.
“Even
when imported foods are taken out of the equation, the government’s
2050 target for an 80 per cent cut in the UK’s carbon footprint will be
unattainable without a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions
from livestock farming,” the authors, citing the Committee on Climate
Change, said in a statement.
The authors used
responses to the 2000-2001 British National Diet and Nutrition Survey to
estimate red and processed meat intake across the UK population and
published data from life cycle analyses to quantify average greenhouse
gas emissions for 45 different food categories.
They
then devised a feasible “counterfactual” alternative, based on a
doubling of the proportion of survey respondents who said they were
vegetarian-to 4.7 per cent of men and 12.3 per cent of women-and the
remainder adopting the same diet as those in the bottom fifth of red and
processed meat consumption.
Those in the top fifth of consumption ate 2.5 times as much as those in the bottom fifth, the survey responses showed.
Therefore,
adopting the diet of those eating the least red and processed meat
would mean cutting average consumption from 91 to 53 g a day for men and
from 54 to 30 g for women.
The calculations showed
that this would significantly cut the risk of coronary artery disease,
diabetes, and bowel cancer by between 3 and 12 per cent across the
population as a whole.
This reduction in risk would
be more than twice as much as the population averages for those at the
top end of consumption who moved to the bottom end.
Furthermore,
the expected reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 0.45
tonnes per person per year, or just short of 28 million tonnes of the
equivalent of CO2 a year.
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