Inform, raise awareness and change. This is the proposition followed by a published study. Nature Food By three researchers from the University of California, Occidental College and Claremont Graduate University (USA) He showed how a simple conversation about the effects of excessive meat consumption can have direct consequences in tackling climate change.
Previous studies have shown that meat consumption and other meat-related activities account for about 15% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, or that reducing this consumption to two hamburgers per person per week would greatly reduce global warming. Building on this foundation, researchers Andrew Jalil, Joshua Tasoff and Arturo Vargas Bustamante set out to examine how disclosure of this information could encourage the public to change their eating habits.
To do this, in the fall of 2017 researchers recruited 213 students and divided them into two different groups. All volunteers in the first group 50-minute talk on the negative impact of meat consumption on the environment, including clearing forests to create more grazing land, the enormous amount of water needed to raise cattle, or the methane they expel during their lifetime.
Added to this are explanations for the negative health consequences of eating too much meat, such as a greater susceptibility to heart disease.
On the contrary, Volunteers in the second group just listened to another talk that was not about food.
Visible and long-lasting results
During the three years following the negotiations, researchers watched students eat In the school cafeteria, it represents about 100,000 meals in total. The results revealed that Volunteers in the first group (the person listening to the talk) ate 11% less beef, 9% less poultry and 9% less fish food. compared to their normal diet. On the other hand, there was a 20% increase in vegetable dishes.
Researchers explain that They found no signs of reversing this change in the students’ diet and even slightly improved it over the three years analyzed.. The questionnaires applied showed that 82% of the students in the group declared that they changed their meat consumption habits, 64% confirmed they did it for climate change and 33% for health.
“Our findings suggest that informative interventions can be cost-effective and lead to lasting shifts towards more sustainable food choices,” the study authors wrote.
Reference article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00712-1
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