What kind of food do you eat? Are you conscious of the types of food you consume or do you stuff yourself silly with whatever is available? Today, we are constantly bombarded with media reports about research on the right diet to follow to help us maintain a healthy lifestyle or lose weight - 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 to get our teeth into.

 

A flexitarian diet involves eating plant-based foods and only occasionally eating meat and fish. You might think this is a halfway¹ house to being a vegetarian² by not completely abstaining³ from meat. But if vegetarianism⁴ is hard to swallow and you fancy chomping⁵ on the occasional lean steak, then this could be the choice for you.

 

This eating style allows you to supplement some ingredients that you wouldn't get in a stricter vegan diet – another trend growing in popularity. And like veganism, flexitarianism isn't about eating carefully to help you lose a few pounds - it's something people choose for ethical⁶ 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 by 2050.

 

This research found that food waste will need to be halved⁷ and farming practices will also have to improve to achieve this. But without a single solution, a combined approach is needed. Dr Marco Springmann from the University of Oxford⁸ was one of the lead authors of the report. He told the BBC "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."

 

But whereas 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 OK 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 emissions⁹ from agriculture would be cut by more than half.

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