Nutrition Science and Everyday Application - beta v 0.1

PROTEIN FOOD CHOICES AND SUSTAINABILITY 355
• If you eat meat every day, try adding a “meatless Monday” into your week and
experiment with some vegetarian recipes. Once you’ve adapted to that, try adding
another day.
• Replace some of your beef meals with dishes featuring chicken, pork, eggs, fish, or
legumes.
• Eat smaller portions of meat and add more plant foods to your plate. For example,
if you enjoy spaghetti and meat sauce, try using less meat in your sauce and
adding in vegetables like mushrooms, bell peppers, and carrots. Your meal will be
more nutrient-dense and maybe even more flavorful.
When you consider that moderate shifts like these would not only be good for the planet
but also good for our health, then they don’t seem like much of a sacrifice. A 2016 study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that just
following standard dietary guidelines (which recommend a variety of protein sources,
including plant proteins, and eating more whole grains, fruits and vegetables) could reduce
mortality by 6 to 10 percent and cut greenhouse gas emissions by 29 to 70 percent. 3,4
This page from the World Resources Institute provides more information: Sustainable
Diets: What You Need to Know in 12 Charts, by Janet Ranganathan and Richard Waite, April
20, 2016.
ANIMAL AGRICULTURE AND ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE
One of the biggest current threats to public health is antibiotic resistance. Antibiotics are
life-saving drugs, but over time, bacteria can develop resistance to them. This means that
the antibiotics no longer work to kill the bacteria causing infections, leaving people with
more severe illnesses and fewer treatment options, often needing to try different antibiotics
that have more side effects. There are now some bacterial infections for which we have
no working antibiotics to treat them. According to the CDC, at least 2.8 million people are
infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year in the U.S, and these infections are
thought to kill at least 35,000 people annually. 5 Addressing this problem will require us to be
more careful about how we use antibiotics, invest in research to develop new ones, and to
develop other ways of preventing bacterial disease, such as new vaccines.
Antibiotics are important to both human and animal medicine. When we’re sick with a
bacterial illness, we may need antibiotics to treat it, and the same is true of animals, whether
they’re raised for agriculture or part of our families as our pets. The problem is that the more
we use antibiotics, the more chances bacteria have to evolve resistance to them, and the less
effective those antibiotics become.