Switching to Plant-Based Diets Could Save More Than 200,000 Lives per Year, Study Finds

Many people have heard that switching to a more plant-based diet has health benefits. But while adjusting your diet may be a personal choice, its impacts are far from just individual.

According to a recent study by an international team of researchers, shifting our diets to ones that are more plant-based could prevent as many as 236,000 premature deaths per year globally by improving air quality, according to The Conversation. It could also increase gross domestic product (GDP).

“Air pollution increases cardiovascular and respiratory-disease risk, and reduces cognitive and physical performance. Food production, especially of animal products, is a major source of methane and ammonia emissions which contribute to air pollution through the formation of particulate matter and ground-level ozone,” the authors of the study wrote. “Our findings suggest that incentivising dietary changes towards more plant-based diets could be a valuable mitigation strategy for reducing ambient air pollution and the associated health and economic impacts, especially in regions with intensive agriculture and high population density.”

According to a 2021 study, a third of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions come from food systems. If we do not mitigate them, these emissions will likely lead to a global temperature rise above the 1.5 degrees Celsius scientists have said is the limit to avoid the worst effects of climate change, The Conversation said previously.

“Dietary changes towards lower consumption of animal source foods… substantially reduced agricultural emissions — by 84–86% globally for the adoption of vegan diets, 69–70% for vegetarian diets, and 44–48% for flexitarian diets,” the new study said.

Agriculture not only impacts land use, but also adversely affects air quality, research has shown.

“The food system is a major cause of ambient air pollution, with significant impacts on human health. Of particular importance are ammonia emissions that are generated when manure and other fertilizers are handled and applied to fields. Through the formation of ammonium salts, ammonia contributes to the concentration of air-borne fine particular matter, including particles with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5). Such particles are linked to a range of health impacts, including cardiovascular and respiratory diseases,” the new study said.

The World Health Organization has said that agriculture was responsible for approximately one-fifth of the four million premature deaths that were associated with ambient air pollution in 2019.

The new study looked at the effects on air quality of people worldwide shifting toward healthier diets that are better for the environment, The Conversation said. That included flexitarian, vegetarian and vegan diets.

The researchers found that air pollution could be significantly reduced by moving toward plant-based diets, and that regions with large amounts of livestock — like northern Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the midwestern United States and southern China — would experience especially noticeable reductions in concentrations of fine particulate matter.

In addition to the health benefits of cleaner air, the research team discovered that the adoption of flexitarian diets could prevent more than 100,000 premature deaths worldwide.

And the health perks only go up as people consume fewer animal products. In Europe and North America alone, the adoption of vegan diets could result in 20 percent fewer premature deaths caused by all air pollution. If everyone on the planet switched to vegan diets, more than 200,000 fewer premature deaths would result from air pollution.

“We consider these scenarios as illustrative ‘what if’ exercises intended to provide inputs into decision-making. Our focus is on the relative changes in emissions, air pollution, and health impacts that are associated with dietary changes towards this set of dietary patterns,” the study said.

The findings of the study also pointed to positive economic impacts of cleaner air, with a switch to vegan diets having the potential to increase the worldwide GDP by $1.3 trillion, or more than one percent.

“Improving air quality is undoubtedly beneficial for our health and the economy. We argue that dietary changes should thus be placed firmly on the policy menu,” wrote Marco Springmann, lead author of the study and a senior researcher on environment and health at University of Oxford, and Toon Vandyck, another of the study’s authors who is also a research fellow in economics at KU Leuven, in The Conversation. “Embracing more plant-based diets is a cost-effective strategy for tackling emissions. But it also lowers the need for expensive investments in emission-reducing equipment for livestock systems, such as scrubbers that remove ammonia from the air.”

Other benefits of moving toward more plant-based diets include less land use, fewer fertilizers and less water for agriculture. “Together with measures to guide farmers in the transition, our food systems can be steered towards sustainability,” Springmann and Vandyck wrote in The Conversation.