SCIENCE

THE UP COMING: Dartmouth Films has set 19th April 2024 as the release date for the insightful and provocative documentary 'I Could Never Go Vegan' across the UK and Ireland. Directed by Thomas Pickering and featuring executive producers, including the well-known actress and vegan advocate Alicia Silverstone, the film embarks on a comprehensive journey to dissect the numerous objections that people have towards adopting a vegan lifestyle. Despite the rising trend of veganism, the documentary delves into the reasons why the majority are hesitant to reduce their consumption of animal products.…

GEORGINA GUSTIN: When researchers at the United Nations published a bombshell report in 2006 called “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the livestock industry soon realized it had a major public relations challenge on its hands. Media outlets around the world covered the report and its main findings: Livestock are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reined in, and cutting emissions from the industry should become a focus of public policy, on par with cutting emissions from fossil fuels. It was the first time such a high-level report had come to this conclusion. In the…

CHARLOTTE POINTING: 'Feeding Tomorrow' is the people who grow food and the people who eat food working together to transform the entire ecology of the planet,” says farmer Mark Shepard in the new documentary Feeding Tomorrow, released on January 23. The film, which has already won multiple awards, including Best Feature Documentary at the Ceres Food Film Festival, guides viewers through the current reality of the food system, which prioritizes fast and cheap production, and as a result, is destroying ecosystems, fuelling climate change, and threatening our health. But, as the name suggests,…

PROVEG INTERNATIONAL: This report shows how packaging colour can influence consumers' purchasing decisions and steer their preferences toward plant-based-meat products. We'll delve into the application of choice-architecture design, particularly the use of harnessing attractive colours as a nudge, in order to promote the consumption of plant-based meat. Marketers in the food industry can use the insights to strategically design packaging and branding that appeals to consumers' preferences for certain colours, effectively encouraging the consumption of plant-based meat. In recent years,…

OSCAR RUEDA: To limit global warming at 1.5°C, climate mitigation pathways project the need to remove 100–1,000 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been the most prominent carbon removal method considered. However, massive BECCS deployment would likely require cropland expansion to produce the biomass feedstock needed. Such an expansion may worsen biodiversity due to the loss of natural land and food and water security due to competition for land and water resources. A transition from consuming animal-source proteins to…

BRIELLE BENYON: Patients with prostate cancer may experience fewer sexual and urinary side effects if they take on a plant-based diet, according to recent research published in the journal, Cancer... The study included 3,505 individuals with non-metastatic prostate cancer who filled out food-frequency questionnaires and had their quality of life calculated by the Expanded Prostate Cancer Index Composite, which, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a 15-item questionnaire that measures urinary incontinence, urinary irritation, as well as bowel, sexual and hormonal health-related…

L. SYD M JOHNSON: One Health (OH) is an approach to health that views the health of humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems as interconnected. Conceptually, it emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to global health challenges. The World Health Organization notes that OH “is particularly relevant for food and water safety, nutrition, the control of zoonoses … pollution management, and combatting antimicrobial resistance.” This statement of priorities is reflected in the growing literature on OH and pandemics, wherein the emphasis has often been on nonhuman animals as vectors of disease and…

NURIA ALMIRON: Climate change denial refers to the stances that advocate against the evidence posited for human-induced global warming... Since the publication of Livestock's Long Shadow by the Food and Agriculture Organization in 2006, an increasing number of governmental and non-governmental organizations and independent researchers have pointed at animal agriculture, and, by extension, animal-based diets, as a primary contributor to global warming. At the same time, over the last few decades, animal advocates, animal rights organizations, and many scholars and experts from a wide array…

MATTHEW ADAMS: There can be little doubt that industrialized animal agriculture reveals human-animal relations defined by routinized, institutionalized violence on a staggering scale. The number of animals involved is astonishing. There are an estimated 23 billion chickens on the planet at any one time, roughly three chickens for every human, by far the most numerous bird species alive today. The number slaughtered annually is estimated by the United Nations at 66 billion; compared to 1.5 billion pigs and 0.3 billion cattle. The overwhelming majority of these animals are reared and killed in…

CHEF'S PENCIL: If you’ve ever thought about starting a new diet at the beginning of the year, you’re not alone. Much of the world sees New Year’s Day as a time to make lifestyle changes or commit to new habits, and the proportion of Google searches dedicated to diet and nutrition on New Year’s Day can be nearly double that during the last week of the preceding year. Overall, interest in dieting steadily drops as each year progresses, until the next New Year’s Day comes around. Our research is based on Google Trends data for the year 2022. We also got a glance of diet searches for the first…