Strength By Fitness
Sustainability & Nutritional Coaching Needs to Walk Hand in Hand. This is a 5-minute-read on Why that is.
Welcome to another fact-based article from Strength by Fitness.
I have for the past 15 or so years of talking about, writing, and coaching about health, fitness, nutrition, and sustainability often been met with this fundamentally flawed core question. “Why is sustainability an important metric to consider for nutritional coaching and our individual food choices”?
So, in this short-form article from Strength By Fitness I will answer that loud and clear. The instant seed that fueled this 5-minute article came this weekend when I was once again asked the above question. So here goes.
Land use. Greenhouse emissions. Fresh-water usage. Crop death. Water, land & air pollution. Mammal extinction. human health outcomes. It all matter & it all say the same thing.
Think of Earth as an almost closed-off circular system with a finite capacity to handle pollution, natural resource drain, loss, and imbalances.
Now take roughly 9 billion humans and add our individual environmental impact together, and you are left with the cold hard mathematical reason why human sustainability matters so immensely much.
Case A. Land per x amount of edible protein.
Beef requires roughly 20 times more land than nuts, and 35 times more than grains to produce the same amount of edible protein.
Yes, beef is a wonderful protein source from a quality point of view, there is no disputing that.
But you will be able to reach the same protein quality, absorption, amino acid content and resulting, health and fitness outcomes with any well-planned plant-based food plan that provides enough protein in total, from a wide enough array of daily protein sources.
Case B, Cow milk vs Plant-based options.
Case B. Cows Milk vs Plant-based Options.
24% of calories in a milk cow’s feed end up as the nutrition you eventually consume in the form of dairy. Consequently, 76% of the calories that are used in the production are wasted.
One liter of cow milk requires roughly 600+ liters of fresh water. Compare this with soy milk which only needs 30L per liter of soy milk.
As for landmass. One L of cow milk requires 9m2 of land, while soy milk only needs 0.66m2.
Case 3. When viewed as 1000 calories of human food.
It takes about 120m2 to produce 1000 calories for human consumption when we talk about beef cattle. Peas, on the other hand, manage to provide those high-quality, nutritionally packed calories while only using 2.16m2 of landmass.
So, in the end, it does not matter if we look at it from a land mass perspective. Or if our concern is greenhouse emissions, freshwater usage, crop death, forest or land cleansing, wild mammals or how much protein you get from various food sources, our impact on biodiversity, water, or air pollution, fossil fuel usage or human health.
Sustainability matters not because of morals, but because of the cold hard data that is reality. The mathematics of feeding close to 9 billion people with vastly inferior food ( from a sustainability perspective ) doesn’t work anymore.
Best of all, while animal-based food choices can be perfectly healthy, and nutritionally good food choices, such as eggs, fish, and chicken, the more plant-based foods we consume daily, the better our health outcomes across our entire health span. Now, I am not saying that we can not consume or produce any animal-based foods at all. But, what I am saying is that no matter your food or coaching preference, sustainability, our food choices & nutritional coaching needs to go hand in hand.
Case in point, the total amount of land that is used worldwide for agriculture. Right now humanity as a whole uses roughly 4.x billion ha of global land for agriculture.
If we shift globally to fish, eggs & whole plant-based foods our need for agricultural landmass would shrink almost all the way down to 1 million ha while producing the same amount of nutrients for human consumption.
Talk about a massive difference and no drawbacks. Best of all that would reverberate through all sustainability metrics too, including human health.
Less land usage means substantially less pollution, wildlife decimation, old forest destruction, more meadows & pollinators and a lot less natural resource drainage. All while providing better nutrition, climate change resilience and reaping better human health outcomes.
Boom.
This coach-led, and fact-based high-quality education was completely free for this time :).
If you are wondering how plant-based and animal-based food choices stack up against our health and fitness progression, jump on over to our other articles here on Strength By Fitness, or visit our Medium publication, aptly named Strength By Fitness too.
Strength By Fitness master coach Mike has been covering fact-based nutrition, health, and fitness in length for the past 15 years and lived a healthy fit life for more than double that, and yes, we also coach people online as well as in-person, get in touch if you need our unlimited online coaching help or in-person guidance and help.
Cited data.
1. Our World In Data. Plant-based foods versus Omnivore.
If the world adopted a plant-based diet, we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares – Our World in Data.
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