It's Earth Day.
Paleoanthropologists suggest that some 50% of our Stone Age ancestors’ calories came from plants. Given that animal foods are generally much more energy dense than plant foods, a diet of 50% plant calories is, by volume, still a diet of mostly plants.
Human health is moot on an uninhabitable Earth. Living well requires a hospitable planet on which to do the living. If I do have a bias about healthful eating, it’s that our health cannot and should not be achieved at the expense of the Earth. Whatever the arguments for mostly meat-based diets, for instance, they start to fall apart rather quickly in a world of over 7 billion of us.
We all have common reason to do just that; namely, the common ground of our home planet. The environmental, ecological, and ethical costs of preferential meat consumption are all very high for a population of more than 7 billion. The water expenditure alone makes the practice dubious, if not disastrous, in an increasingly thirsty world.
-- David L. Katz, MD, MPH
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