255 grams per week. That's the short answer to how much meat you can eat without harming the planet. And that only applies to poultry and pork.

255 grams per week. That’s the short answer to how much meat you can eat without harming the planet. And that only applies to poultry and pork.

Beef cannot be eaten in meaningful quantities without exceeding planetary boundaries, according to an article published by a group of DTU researchers in the journal Nature Food. So says Caroline H. Gebara, postdoc at DTU Sustain and lead author of the study."

Our calculations show that even moderate amounts of red meat in one’s diet are incompatible with what the planet can regenerate of resources based on the environmental factors we looked at in the study. However, there are many other diets—including ones with meat—that are both healthy and sustainable," she says.

  • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
    5·
    3 days ago

    I want this paper without the “healthy” part. Tell us the limits of sustainability, then let people choose their own adventure, even if it isn’t a good one by whatever arbitrary standard is set by the researchers for what health means to them.

    • Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.caEnglish
      4·
      3 days ago

      You want… less information? How does having information on health affects not “let” people make their own choices about their health concerns?? Indeed, how can they meaningfully make such decisions without that information?

      • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        3 days ago

        No I want more information. I don’t want the current consensus of “healthy” between the authors, which may use arbitrary benchmarks, to prune down options that still satisfy a goal of sustainability.

        The research team’s calculations take into account a number of environmental factors such as CO2 emissions, the consumption of water and land use, as well as the health impact of a particular diet. In total, they have examined more than 100,000 variations of 11 types of diets and calculated their respective environmental and health effects.

        One of these things is not like the others and it looks like it is used to prune the set of variations. Is unhealthy like I get scurvy and die? Or is it that it may correlate with high cholesterol? Or is it that you are at risk of foodborne illness for eating under cooked meat/eggs/seafood? “Healthy” could encompass any of those and that’s nuts for data management.

        • Beastimus@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          Yeah, I agree here, they do supply all the data and methodology (though obviously some of it is paywalled) and I see how the way they presented it is probably the best for the LCD consumer, but I would have liked a decent concise summary of just the sustainability data.