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Eating meat, especially beef, is a big contributor to climate change
brent Hofacker/iStockphoto/Getty Images
The production of meat is a major contributor to global warming and eating less of it is better for your health. Simply telling people about this can lead to a reduction in their meat consumption, with the effect lasting at least three years, a study has found.
Andrew Jalil at Occidental College in Los Angeles and his colleagues recruited 213 students at a US university with an average age of 19 and randomly divided them into two groups. One group listened to a single 50-minute talk on the consequences of climate change, the ways in which meat and dairy production – especially beef – increase greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation, and the various lines of evidence suggesting that eating less meat is healthier. The talk ended by highlighting top sportspeople who eat plant-based diets. The second group listened to a talk on income inequality that wasn’t related to dietary choices.
Studies on dietary choices often rely on participants recording what they eat, which isn’t very reliable. But in this study, the team instead monitored each student’s purchases at the college dining facilities, where the students almost always had lunch and dinner while on campus.
Before hearing the talk on meat consumption, 59 per cent of the meals chosen by students were meat-based. This fell to 54 per cent on average over the three years after the talk, which is a 9 per cent drop in the proportion of meals containing meat. The effect didn’t diminish over the three years but instead became slightly stronger.
Among the students who listened to the unrelated talk, there was no change in meat consumption, says Jalil.
While both the men and women who heard the talk on diet ate less meat, only the men ate less beef. However, the men were eating beef twice as often as the women to start with, and so had more scope to reduce consumption.
The findings in students might not apply to the general population, but Jalil hopes others will test this. While the reduction is modest, organising similar talks costs very little and could done by companies and other organisations, as well as by schools and universities, the study says.
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