Yahoo News Follow This One Tip for a Healthy Sustainable Diet
Each week, we’ll be bringing you the best advice from the WH team’s brand-new podcast, Going for Goal.
Focused on helping you smash your 2020 health, fitness and wellness goals, leading leading experts share their winning advice every week.
This week, host Roisín Dervish-O'Kane asked how we can all build a sustainable diet. Head here to listen and download on your device.
Whether you’ve gone full-on Veganuary after watching the Netflix's Game Changers documentary or are just flirting with being flexitarian in pursuit of having a more sustainable diet, more of us than ever before are looking to be more ethical when it comes to what we put on our plates in 2020.
This week’s episode of Going for Goal heard from Dr Rosemary Green, Assistant Professor in Nutrition and Sustainability at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
She's one of the foremost experts in how have a sustainable diet - and offered some sage, and surprising, tips on eat ethically while keeping your nutrition in check.
Is there a sustainable diet that isn't vegan?
By this point, we’re all aware that cutting down our meat and dairy consumption is key to protecting our planet. But besides ditching animal products entirely and going vegan what can we do to our diets that can really make a change?
Enter, the ‘low food chain’ diet. What’s that, you ask? Well, turns out that the name does what it says on the tin.
‘It’s a diet where you eat as far down the food chain as you can, basically,’ Dr Green explained. So, yes, plants are very much welcome - but you've got a little more freedom with this sustainable diet compared to going vegan.
What animal products can you eat on the low food chain sustainable diet?
‘It's not exclusively plant-based as it also allows low food chain animals, which are things like bi-valve molluscs such as cockles and mussels,' she added. So you can order Moules frites for your tastebuds and the planet. Boom.
'Insects are also very low down the food chain,' she offered - explaining that, if you're not quite down for chomping on crickets whole, you can get their sustainable protein content via flour - or even blended into protein bars.
‘You can get protein from these animal type foods and its not a completely vegan diet, but the emissions are really low because those animals are converting energy much more efficiently than an animal that’s much higher up the food chain, like a cow or a sheep.’
Worried your sustainable diet isn't sustainable enough?
Still feeling anxious about whether or not you are eating a truly sustainable diet? Dr Green's advice is to not beat yourself up. ‘You’d be paralysed if you tried to make every decision a perfect one,’ she reassured host, Roisín.
‘All we can do is try and minimise the damage that we do and try to maximise any positive opportunities for change that there might be,' she adds.
The final word? shop discerningly; eat your leftovers; try your best not to overthink it. Bon appétit.
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