What can be a better motivation to eat healthy than knowing how much minutes exactly certain foods add to or steel from your life and its impact on the environment? A recent study made this knowledge possible!

The study evaluated 5.853 foods based on the developed 15 dietary risk factors for health and 18 environmental indicators (taking into account life cycle of a product, detailed food recipes as well as anticipated food waste). As a result, the researchers classified foods into 3 color zones: green, yellow and red, based on their combined nutritional and environmental performances.

The green zone represents foods that are recommended to increase in one’s diet and contains foods that are both nutritionally beneficial and have low environmental impacts. Foods in this zone are predominantly nuts, fruits, field-grown vegetables, legumes, whole grains and some seafood.

The red zone includes foods that have either considerable nutritional or environmental impacts and should be reduced or avoided in one’s diet. Nutritional impacts were primarily driven by processed meats, and climate and most other environmental impacts driven by beef, shrimp followed by pork, lamb and greenhouse-grown vegetables.

Based on the proposed classification you can see, f.e., that substituting 10% of daily caloric intake from beef and processed meats for a mix of fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and seafood could reduce your dietary carbon footprint by 1/3, and add 48 “healthy minutes” to your daily life.

Remarkable is that nutritionally beneficial foods might not always generate the lowest environmental impacts and vice versa.

Curious? HERE is the source