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Why Eating Lettuce May be Worse Than Eating Bacon

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Dec 16, 2015 01:33 PM EST

Amazingly, consuming lettuce might actually be worse than eating bacon!

Eating vegetables and fruits could harm the environment, as they have relatively high resource uses as well as greenhouse gas emissions per calorie, according to scienceworldreport.

"Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon," said Paul Fischbeck, one of the researchers. "Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you would think. Eggplant, celery and cucumbers look particularly bad when compared to pork or chicken."

Studying the food supply chain, as well as growing, processing and transporting food, along with sales and service, hits the availability of the resources, in the form of "energy use, water use and GHG emissions".

In order to attack obesity, if we eat less calories, it might affect the environment positively, reducing energy use, water use and greenhouse gas emissions from the food supply chain by about 9 percent But eating healthier food increases the impact on the environment in the three categorie. "Energy use shot up by 38 percent, water use by 10 percent and GHG emissions by 6 percent."

"There's a complex relationship between diet and the environment," said Michelle Tom, one of the researchers, in a news release. "What is good for us health-wise isn't always what's best for the environment. That's important for public officials to know and for them to be cognizant of these tradeoffs as they develop or continue to develop dietary guidelines in the future."

The study was published in Environment Systems and Decisions.

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