Green veggies

| 2 June 2009
minute reading time

You can improve your health and do your part for the environment by going veggie. Researchers from California looked at the diets of 34,000 people of which around half were vegetarians. They found that meaty diets required 2.9 times more water, 2.5 times more energy, 13 times more fertiliser and 1.4 times more pesticides than the vegetarian diets. Lead author Dr Hal Marlow said “Almost everyone has some knowledge that it costs less environmentally or is healthier to be a vegetarian, but there’s no understanding yet of really what that means until you put some numbers behind it.”

Marlow et al., 2009. Diet and the environment: does what you eat matter? American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 89 (5) 1699S-1703S.

About the author
Dr. Justine Butler
I joined Viva! as a health campaigner in 2005 after graduating from Bristol University with a PhD in molecular biology. My scientific training helped me research and write numerous reports, guides and fact sheets for Viva! including Meat the Truth, Fish-Free for Life, One in Nine (breast cancer and diet) and the substantial report on the detrimental health effects of consuming dairy; White Lies. This accompanied Viva!’s report The Dark Side of Dairy which spelt out the inherent cruelty of dairy farming. We were the first UK group to take on the dairy industry in this way, and many of our supporters go vegan after reading these reports.

View author page | View staff profile

Scroll up