Eating less beef could reduce heart attacks, curb climate change: Lancet

 

Food production is responsible for a quarter of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from meat and dairy livestock.

Getting more people around to world to cut down on eating beef could save lives by reducing heart attacks and curbing global temperature rises, according to The Lancet medical journal.

Just as they were caught off guard by the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare systems around the world are ill prepared to cope with the worst impacts of climate change, including heat-related illnesses, the journal’s annual Countdown on Health and Climate Change report concluded.

One of the most effective ways to tackle emissions, they said, is reducing red meat consumption. Food production is responsible for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, most of which come from meat and dairy livestock. The report said per-capita emissions from beef consumption rose 5.5% from 2000 to 2017.

The authors identified a 54% rise in heat-related deaths in older people in the last 20 years, and a record 2.9 billion additional days of heatwave exposure affecting those over 65 in 2019 — almost twice the previous high. They also found that deaths from excess red meat consumption have risen 70% in the last three decades, with the majority of the almost 1 million annual deaths occurring in Western Pacific regions such as China, Korea and Australia.

“It’s really important that we’re taking into account the production and consumption of emissions, in the same way we do for other sectors,” said Ian Hamilton, executive director of the Lancet Countdown, a study that looks at a wide range of issues linking climate change and health. “The outsourcing of emissions to other countries to those who buy them in, and then the risks around that in terms of diet change.”