More and more people are choosing to eat vegan products even if they do not consider themselves to be vegans. It has been estimated that about 100 million people in the United States, which is roughly 33% of the population of the country, admit that they have started to eat more vegan foods despite the fact that they are not vegan. Moreover, nearly 40% of people around the country say they try to eat vegan products, such as vegan beef and plant based meat every day. To add to that, people who consider themselves to be full vegans has gone up by 600% in recent years.
There are a lot of reasons to make the switch to plant based meat and plant based proteins. First of all, it is a healthier way to live. The typical woman who is a vegetarian will live 6.1 years longer than women who continue to eat meat. For men, the results are more dramatic. Vegetarian men can expect to live 9.1 more years than their meat eating counterparts.
Other people either become vegetarians or eat more plant based meat substitute instead of meat because they want to reduce climate change. Now Phys.Org has published a report on the link between meat and climate change.
They note that the agriculture industry is responsible for a lot of what is now called climate change and that this industry has also been hurt by it. Scientists have found that if people ate less animal meat and more plant based meat, people would be healthier and could do more to at least slow the impact of climate change.
For the most part, when people think of the connection between agriculture and climate change, they think of the negative impact the latter has on the former. Climate change is causing disastrous conditions for farmers around the world. From terrible droughts to bad flooding. Much of the problems suffered by the agricultural industry are being felt in the developing world.
At the same time, farms are some of the worst offenders when it comes to the emission of greenhouse gases. New research has shown that farms produce between 10% and 13% of the emissions of greenhouse gases around the world. Much of this is in the form of methane, which is produced in abundance by cows.
Now research done by a European Union project called TRUE has shown that when people move to a more plant based diet from one that is centered around meat, the result is farming that is more sustainable. When scientists at the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland looked into how legumes are grown, they found that the food produced was more nutritious and the cost in terms of pollution of groundwater and the emissions of methane and other gases was much lower.
The Irish researchers learned that when farmers focus on plant based meat, the damage to the environment is reduced. Legume-based proteins were the best for limiting the damage to the environment while increasing the nutritional content of the food produced. Furthermore, they found that some foods, such as peas, had five times as many nutrients in them than any kind of meat including chicken, beef, lamb, and pork.
The study used a few sets of criteria to determine the environmental impact and nutritional content of the foods they were looking at. This allowed them to measure the good done for the environment that was present when people reduced the amount of meat they consumed.
The goal of the research is not to just have academic papers on the subject but to present consumers with practical ways to eat healthier diets that have less of an impact on the planet. They hope that the results of their work will be that people make more informed decisions when it comes to selecting sources of protein to eat.
To increase the success rate for this research, the group is planning to make specific recommendations to farmers on how they can improve their practices while helping them market the plant based meat products. They plan to bring together partners to help develop a way to use the results to improve the quality of life for people all over the globe.
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