Page 101 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

environmentally inefficient source of food (see page 191),
doing so is also a big waste of our collective water and land.
Our excess demand for animal protein sucks up a heck of a lot
of the earth’s natural resources while emitting tons of green-
house gases. The excess also means robbing yourself of the
room in your diet to eat what most people are actually lack-
ing—namely, whole grains and produce. And don’t get me
started on powdery protein supplements. Talk about money
down the drain. Not to mention the taste. Blech.
There can also be long-term risks in consuming too much
protein. Most notably, high-protein diets have been tied to

THE PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT
The United States is the only country of the 195 United
Nations members worldwide to withdraw from the Paris
agreement on climate change that took place in 2015.
The UN set a goal to keep the average rise in global
temperatures to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6
degrees Fahrenheit, compared with the levels before the
Industrial Revolution. That zone is an irreversible tipping
point we want to collectively head off. It’s the only way
to avoid suffering from the most catastrophic disasters
of global warming—from super-extreme weather events
and unsafe heat and drought to lack of drinking water, and
ultimately, political upheaval and warfare over scarce natural
resources critical to human survival. To fully appreciate how
much of an outlier the United States is on this issue, consider
that only two other nations originally did not join this
commonsense accord, which is backed by heaps of science:
Syria and Nicaragua. The former because of being engulfed
in years of catastrophic civil war and being too busy racking
up human rights violations, the latter because the target in
the agreement wasn’t ambitious enough. (Nicaragua is a
global leader in renewable energy.)

90 how to be a Conscious Eater

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