"Healthy" Vegetarian Diets Worse For The Environment Than Eating Meat?

[Toliver]

The article:

"Vegetarian 'Healthy' Diets Worse For The Environment Than Eating Meat"

Quote

"Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."

Of the vegetarians I know, the carbon footprint of the food we consume is usually not high on the list for reasons why they choose to be vegetarians in the first place.

Still, this is interesting food for thought...

[Lisa Shock]

HERE's a rebuttal.

 

The study did not look at a vegetarian diet, it compared what people are eating to what would happen if they ate the same calories but followed percentages as outlined in current government dietary guidelines. Then, they compared a lower calorie diet.

 

The comparison of vegetables to meat is also misleading because they did it by calories. A serving of chicken, say one 40z breast, is 184 calories. Do you know how much celery you'd have to eat to get 184 calories from it? Celery has 4 calories per ounce. To get 184 calories, you'd have to eat 46 ounces (2.875 pounds) of raw celery. Nobody eats that much produce.

 

Bad study turned into clickbait by the addition of a misleading title.

[Toliver]

Lisa, I was hoping an SSB (I consider you one and that's meant as a compliment) would weigh in on this. Thank you for the link to the rebuttal.

When reading these type of studies, it also makes me wonder who funded the study since that may bias the results. It wouldn't surprise me to find the beef industry behind the study mentioned.