Are the Dietary Guidelines for Meat, Fat, Fruit and Vegetable Consumption Appropriate for Environmental Sustainability? A Review of the Literature

Food consumption contributes an estimated 20% to 30% of the total adverse environmental impact in the Western world [1,2], being linked to soil, air, and water pollution and loss of biodiversity [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11, 12,13,14,15,16]. Despite this having been recognised for some time, the idea of altering diet to increase environmental sustainability is a relatively new concept that until the last decade had little real-life implementation [3,4,17,18].