# The nutrition/environment connection

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2007-12-25T13:04:33Z


I went to meet Dean Ornish the other day with Larry. We talk about various things trying to tie together free culture and health. After the meeting, Dean Ornish gave us his new book, The Spectrum. While the book isn't focused primarily on this, Dean Ornish points out the relationship between nutrition and the environment which I found very interesting. ...according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's report Livestock's Long Shadow, animal-based agribusiness generates more greenhouse gasses than all transportation combined. The livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as mesured in carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent than does transportatino (18 percent versus 13.5 percent). Also, it accounts for 9 percent of CO2 derived from human-related activities. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the global warming potential of CO2. It's also responsible for 37 percent of all human-induced methane, which is twenty-three times more warming than CO2. Nitrous oxide and methane come mostly from manure. Imagine about 56 billion "food animals" pooping every day.

Also, livestock now use 30 percent of the earth's land surface, mostly for permanent pasture, but also including 33 percent of global arable land to produce feed for them. Clearing forests to create new pastures is a major driver of deforestation - some 70 percent of forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.I'll try to write more about the book when I finish it, but it might be the most practical nutrition book I've read so far. I may tune my diet a bit afterwards.

UPDATE: The report he is referring, which was published in 2006, is is online.





---

#### Categories

Eating and Cooking, Ecology, Health and Medicine