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Food Choices Impact More than Just Health


By: Ritzuko Gutierrez

Choosing what you eat may be more important than what you think. Dietary choices are one of the major factors that have an impact on human health and the environmental sustainability. Different kinds of food have different impacts. Foods that are associated with improved health, have lower environmental impacts. These include whole grain cereals, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and olive oil.  Fish can have a greater impact on human health and the environment, but it is lower compared to red meats and processed meats. Therefore, the food that has the largest negative impact on the human health and environmental sustainability are processed and unprocessed red meats. These types of food affect the human health by increasing the chances of several diseases like obesity, cancer, diabetes, heart diseases, etc. Also, they impact the environment by pollution, waste, water and land consumption, etc. Unprocessed foods can have a negative impact on health but not so much on the environment. Transitioning to a greater consumption of healthier foods would improve health and environmental sustainability. Therefore, the chances on getting diseases related to nutrition will reduce. Not only that but water use, acidification, eutrophication, land use, and greenhouse emissions will reduce.  Consumers, policy makers, and food companies should look at these findings understand the impact that dietary choices can have when creating a product.

Reader plots of rank-ordered health and enviromental impacts per serving food consumed per day. (Clark. 2019)

References 
Clark, M.A., M. Springmann., J. Hill, and D. Tilman. 2019. Multiple health and environmental impacts of foods. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 116: 23357 - 23362.


Comments

  1. Leticia PerezSeptember 21, 2020 at 6:22 PM

    Regulation of consumption would help tremendously with the over consumption problem that not only affects human health but the environment as well. People must become educated on the basis of proper nutrition and calorie intake to understand how important a correct diet is. Bringing the attention to this problem is one way to start!

    ReplyDelete
  2. M MendezOctober 21, 2020 at 4:46 PM

    This is such an interesting article. I really like the analysis they performed and how they visually represented the data. It is so easy to relate the data to the environmental and human health components. I am happy that eggs were not too detrimental for environmental health - I eat them every day. Great find!

    ReplyDelete

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