Published 20/02/2015

Good news from the United States, where a group of expert advisors has just submitted its latest dietary advice to government, including recommendations to eat less meat.

The Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee advises eating less red and processed meat for health reasons and says switching to a diet higher in “plant-based foods such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet.”

In other words, eat less meat for your own health and for the sake of our planet.

Compassion has long advocated eating less but better meat and we think this recommendation from a panel of highly respected scientists is a huge step forward – especially if the US government adopts it.

Supermarket shelves in the developed world are overflowing with “cheap” meat. Its true cost is to our health and to the planet, as well as the price the animals pay as fodder to the industrial production methods used to sustain artificially cheap meat.

Environmental damage, whether it's local pollution around factory farms, chemical pollution from the pesticides used to spray the vast fields of soy and cereals fed to factory farmed animals, or the prodigious greenhouse gas emissions associated with intensive livestock production is a very real problem: we should be factoring it in to the choices we make about the food we buy.

Eat less but better meat, look out for pasture raised, free-range, organic labels and you can be part of the solution.