How many minutes of your life is a hot dog worth?
The University of Michigan evaluated over 5,800 foods, ranking them based on the impact on the environment and nutritional disease risk.
The good news?
Substituting as little as 10% of daily calories from beef or processed meats with fruits, vegetables, nuts, and beans could reduce your carbon footprint by 30%.
The other good news? This switch also added 48 healthy minutes to your life.
The mostly good news.
Researchers then classified foods based on nutritional benefits and environmental impact. They used IMPACT World +, which is a method to assess the life cycle of foods. This includes production, processing, manufacturing, preparation, consumption, and waste. They also added water use and human health damages to develop scores for 18 environmental indicators.
Colour codes
The researchers then organized the foods into three colour classifications, red, yellow, and green. The classifications are based on the combined environmental and nutritional scores.
Green Foods
The foods with a low environmental impact and are nutritionally beneficial. This group consists mostly of nuts, fruits, field-grown vegetables, legumes and whole grains. They also included some seafood*.
Red Foods
The foods to avoid because of the environmental impact or the nutritional cost of eating them. These include beef, pork, lamb, and processed meats.
Researchers recommend reducing the foods with the highest negative health and environmental impacts. These include processed meat, beef, shrimp, followed by pork, lamb and greenhouse-grown vegetables. While increasing the nutritionally beneficial foods. Which include field-grown fruits and vegetables, legumes, and nuts.
And that hotdog? Eating it will cost you 36 healthy minutes of your life.
Change your mind, change your health
Shayla
*The entire article is behind a paywall and there is no mention of which types of seafood they thought were sustainable and there is no mention of pollutants often found in fish.
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