Could you be flexitarian?
What kind of food do you eat? Are you conscious of the types of food you consume? Although there is research on the right diet to follow to help us maintain a healthy lifestyle — but it's hard to know which one to pick and, once chosen, it's harder still to stick to it. And now there's another choice for you.
A flexitarian diet involves eating plant-based foods and only occasionally eating meat and fish. This is a lovely alternative to being a vegetarian by not completely resisting meat.
This eating style allows you to supplement some ingredients that you wouldn't get in a stricter vegan (纯素) diet. And like veganism, flexitarianism isn't about eating carefully to help you lose a few pounds — it's something people choose for ethical reasons, to help the planet. And a study into the global food system and how it affects the climate, has found that eating mainly plant-based foods is one of three key steps towards a sustainable future for all.
This research found that food waste will need to be halved and farming practices will also have to improve to achieve this. But without a single solution, a combined approach is needed. Dr. Marco Springmann, one of the lead authors of the report argued "We really found that a combination of measures would be needed to stay within environmental limits and those include changes towards healthier more plant-based diets."
While vegans think it's wrong for animals to be killed for food, flexitarians believe eating meat once in a while is acceptable. And Dr. Springmann agrees — as long as we "treat it as a luxury, it's probably acceptable but you shouldn't have more than one serving of red meat, which includes beef and pork, per week." And here's another fact to digest: If we moved to this type of diet, the study found that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture would be cut by more than half.
