Dr. Marco Springmann on diet and climate change: ‘I’m already worried about us’
Dr. Marco Springmann: Our diets became totally out-of-whack due to the high production and incentives that were provided to farmers to produce meat and dairy.
RTE: Food is an obvious sensitive spot for many people, as it’s the touchpoint for community, comfort and pleasure. Dr. Marco Springmann saw this when the EAT Report – a landmark food study published in The Lancet that recommended reducing how much red meat and dairy you eat – was published. “I think it really brought forward a much-needed discussion on the health and environmental implications of our diets and the high impact our dietary choices have”, he told The Ray D’Arcy Show. “The reactions, and the heated reactions to it, show that indeed some system change is needed”…
Springmann, a food-related emissions expert and senior researcher on environment, sustainability and public health at the Univeristy of Oxford, co-authored the report and is one of the experts on What Planet Are You On? The report found that overconsumption of red meat and dairy is linked to higher risk of colon cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and Ireland has a particularly unhealthy diet thanks to our fondness of red meat and dairy. Irish people, he says, eat “seven to eight times too much red meat, two to three times too much dairy”…
Cutting out production on one or two foods isn’t going to help protect the planet, he says. “It’s the whole food environment. When you think about why do people eat what they eat, it probably has to do with what they find in their supermarkets, what is cheap and affordable. All of those things have to change to some degree to make it easy for citizens to have healthier and more sustainable diets”…
And of course, we didn’t always eat like this. “Our diets became totally out of whack due to the high production and incentives that were provided to farmers to produce that much meat and dairy”, Springmann says…So what’s needed to make a change, alongside our tweaked diets? “We really need good investments and help promotion through grants, we need those carbon taxes, we need those changes in agriculture incentives. We need politicians that speak the truth”, he says. SOURCE…
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