Veg out

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What

Fancy discovering some delicious new dishes, improving your health, and chopping your carbon footprint?

What we choose to eat is a personal decision, however the evidence is clear, eating less meat is good for you and good for the planet.

With so many tasty veggie and vegan recipes and options on offer, it’s easy to add more plant based meals to your eating endeavours.

You’ll reap the benefits in no time, and with the money you save, you can make meat a treat by buying healthier, more ethically farmed meat.

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Benefits

For people

Eating less meat, in particular processed meat, and red meat has a number of health benefits, including reducing the risk of heart disease, cancer and obesity.

Eating a small amount of processed red meat - like bacon, salami and sausages - regularly literally takes years off your life (specifically, it leads to a 20% increase in mortality rate).

Cutting back on the bacon and steak has other people too. Large areas of rainforest are destroyed to grow food for livestock, and this displaces local communities, and causes social unrest and corruption.

For planet

Cows burp. A lot. And pigs eat. A lot.

A whopping 26% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from the food we eat, with animal products responsible for well over half of those emissions.

Our appetite for red meat means lots of the world’s land, energy and water is used to fill those shop shelves and restaurant menus.

After chocolate (noooo!), beef has the second biggest water footprint per kilo.

One beefburger alone uses 660 gallons of water, which is the equivalent of showering for two months!1

The main cause of tropical deforestation is agriculture. As well as staggering greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation disturbs rainfall patterns, increases flood risks, contaminates rivers and endangers native species. Best avoid it if we can, eh?

How

Going meat-free for a few days isn't too tough and (depending on your current meat-o-meter) could really shift the dial on your impact. Just check out the Meat-Free Mondays campaign if you don’t believe us!

For your health and wallet, try switching to whole foods - veggies, pulses, beans and wholegrains - rather than processed plant based alternatives.