Today is World Meat Free Day, and what a better way to get involved and think of varying the amount of meat consumed. You could try it at least for one day!

Think of swapping some of your daily meals for a meat –free meal and making sure it consists of proteins sourced from legumes, seeds and grains can help you meet your daily protein intake. By ditching the meat just for this day or for a couple of meals, it also puts you up for the challenge of being versatile with your vegetables, increasing your fibre intake and as a matter of fact be good to your digestion, skin, and overall glow.

A few statistics can help us also get a better overall picture of how we are doing on a global scale. The organisers of World Meat Free Day suggests, that by 2050, the global population is set to increase to over 9 million people and if we do continue with our current diets this can lead to meat production to reach approximately 200 million tones. In essence, this is a figure, which simply is hard to reach and the world would need to reduce meat consumption by 50 %!

Eating less meat can also help cut down on the planet’s second most prevalent greenhouse gas, methane. While the world looks at attempts to reduce emissions of harmful gas through energy generation, transport and buildings, the impact from food production is often left out.

Research led by scientists at the Oxford Martin School, found that the widespread adoption of a vegetarian diet or an increase in vegetarian foods, would bring down greenhouse gas emissions by 63% and adhering to health guidelines on meat consumption could cut global food related emissions by nearly a third by 2050.

On another note, giving up or reducing your consumption can also help save water. The simple tasks of having no meat for one day, saves the equivalent of nine people’s daily water usage.

There is no need to go out there and buy multiple recipe books to have more vegetarian friendly ideas, supermarkets provide recipe cards as well as multiple recipes or accounts on social media.

Simply put, we need to make changes to our dietary choices as well as the products we purchase (be it supplements or superfoods ) in order to be better equipped for the future, so why not start today?

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MetroUK | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MetroUK/