How Americans Can Incorporate Sustainability Into Their Diets

According to a new study published in the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that a leading motivator to stay on your diet is to focus on its impact on the environment.

Researchers at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, examined the connection between food sustainability and national dietary recommendations. Their premise was that the lack of awareness that international governments create for an environmentally sustainable diet changes things. After analyzing 37 countries worldwide, only four included any mention of sustainability in their official dietary guidelines, despite all of the information supporting a plant-based diet’s positive effect on global sustainability.

The research team studied the potential impacts of a plant-based diet on environmental factors such as carbon emissions, water quality and land use to see if a change in countries’ official dietary guidelines could result in a lower environmental impact of humans.

The findings showed that the nations that would have the most positive impact economically and in the health of their environment were the United States, Australia, Brazil and Canada.

The study took into consideration the economic power of each nation and individual governments’ ability to create change, showing that higher-income nations would be able to reinstate the greatest reductions in environment-damaging foods.

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The study highlights an enormous area of opportunity for governments to help improve the environment while improving national public health, especially in a time when global warming’s escalation is creating a powerful influence over global natural disasters.  

The U.S. government’s stance on the spiraling global issue was best stated a couple weeks ago when President Trump vowed to remove climate change from the official National Security Strategy list of global threats. As you know, the U.S. remains the only nation to refrain from signing the Paris Climate Agreement. Maybe with this research, proving a link with one’s concerns about global climate change and our weight and healthful eating may be just the thing we need to wake up America.