The Nuance
These 3 Food Choices Matter Most
New research identifies the most beneficial changes you can make for your own and the planet’s health.
For most of my life, eating meals meant eating some meat. A proper breakfast came with bacon or sausage. Lunch was meat between slices of bread. Dinner was meat with other stuff on the side. If there wasn’t beef, chicken, or pork on my plate, it wasn’t a meal — it was a snack.
Old habits die hard, and it took time for me to reform.
At first I did so for health reasons; despite specious arguments from the Paleo crowd, eating a lot of meat is almost certainly bad for your heart and bad for your gut. It’s also terrible for the planet, and this latter recognition further motivated me to make changes. First I cut back, then I cut out. I still eat meat, but my consumption — especially when it comes to beef — is a fraction of what it was a decade ago.
I could do more, but Quentin Read says I’m doing my part. “Any reduction is good, but if everyone ate red meat once a week or less, that would be incredibly beneficial,” he says.
Read, PhD, is a data scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture. It’s a new gig for him. Before he joined the USDA, he was at the National…
