Chinese Diet Touted as Healthy and Sustainable Compared to Global Counterparts

The idea that individuals must change their behavior in order to combat climate change has received a fair bit of pushback from critics who claim that such arguments are meant to distract from the vast amounts of pollution and greenhouse gasses produced by industry. How, these critics ask, can you ask the average Joe to alter his entire lifestyle while the smoke of coal fumes billows non-stop? And if we could make industry cleaner, would it even be necessary for him to change his habits at all?

According to a report by the EAT­-Lancet commission, it absolutely is necessary. But Average Zhou? He doesn't need to change a thing. 

The report was put together by professors from Harvard, Oxford, and other prestigious institutions, in association with the non-profit EAT, which aims to promote diets around the world that are not just healthier but also sustainable. And that caveat works the other way around too. As EAT director Dr. Brent Loken says, “You don’t want a situation where diets are [environmentally] sustainable but people are having heart attacks.”

In essence, what we eat affects our planet as much as our bodies. Food production makes up 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, compared to just 21 percent emitted by industry. A small fraction of food emissions can be cut by updating production methods, but the experts at EAT say that even if every producer in the world improved their methods, the world would still be on track for dangerous levels of climate change if people don’t change their diets as well.

The primary reason that diets need to change is the large amounts of red meat consumed in the US and other Western countries. There is simply no way to produce real beef without cows that belch greenhouse gasses (or at least, there is no way yet), not to mention the toll that it takes on people’s health.

But the story is different in other parts of the world. In Sub-Saharan Africa, people consume the right amount of red meat but eat far too many starchy vegetables. The Chinese diet, on the other hand, is something of the third bowl of porridge in this Goldilocks story: China consumes just the right amount of pork and veggies to be both healthy and sustainable.

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When the experts from EAT came to Beijing last month, they stressed that China must not adopt the American diet, as has happened in some low-income parts of the world, to the detriment of the environment. Unfortunately, American fast food threatens to proliferate Chinese cities, the marketing power of which is known to have altered cultural diets in the past.

As for the West, it is unlikely that a Chinese-style diet would ever be widely adopted, but the authors of the report hope that a more environmentally friendly Mediterranean diet can be encouraged instead. In partnership with Yale University, efforts have been launched to reshape diets in America beginning with universities. Yale hospitality expert Rafi Taherian is confident that this is a good strategy for reshaping the eating habits of the general population. He claims that simply holding campaigns in the canteens of Ivy League schools has already had an impact on the diets of Americans on the East Coast as a whole.

Changing diets doesn't necessarily mean going full-on meatless, however, and it's not just EAT that recommends a modest amount of meat. A recent study at John Hopkins University suggests that including a bit of meat while cutting out dairy entirely has a lower carbon footprint than a vegetarian diet that includes dairy. That is because dairy production is not far behind the most egregious meats in terms of its carbon emissions. The authors of the study recommend a 2/3 vegetarian diet where just one meal per day includes meat.

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Images: Shutterstock, EAT