Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - How To Become An Ethical Eater

Episode Date: January 23, 2020

Veganuary is in full swing, and whether you’ve gone cold turkey on animal products, adopted a flexitarian approach or you’re giving Meat Free Monday a go, eating in a way that supports planetary health will be on the minds of many at the moment, following recent climate events. But the deeper you delve into ethical eating, the more confused you can become. The recent news that almond milk production is to blame for wiping out millions of honey bees is just the latest blow for those striving to eat sustainably. In this episode, Senior Editor Roisín Dervish-O’Kane is joined by Rosemary Green, Assistant Professor in Nutrition and Sustainability at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to discuss the latest in sustainability science, the nuances and contradictions involved in attempting to eat ethically and how to do so without neglecting nutrition.  Join Women’s Health on Instagram: @womenshealthuk Join Roisín Dervish-O’Kane on Instagram: @roisin.dervishokane Have a goal in mind that you want us to put to the experts? Find us on Instagram @womenshealthuk and drop a voice note into our inbox, telling us your name and your goal, and it could be the subject of a future episode.  Topics:  What are the different strands of ethical eating?  Why are animal products so harmful for the environment?  What is the planetary health diet? How does eating ethically marry with eating healthily?  How can labels be useful when attempting to eat more ethically? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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19 and over, physically present in Ontario. Eligibility restrictions apply. See Golden Nuggett Casino.com for details. Please play responsibly. Hello and welcome back to Going for Goal. the new Women's Health podcast that's here to help you make good on your 2020 health goals. I'm your host, Rochine DeVishechakain, Women's Health Senior Editor. If this is the first time you're tuning in, great to have you with us.

Each week on Going for Goal, we guide a member of the women's health community towards their health and wellness goal. If you want neuroscientists' advice on how to build a fitness regimen you love too much to quit or learn from qualified doctors how to lose weight without crash dieting and much, much more. Go have a listen to our previous episodes. This episode, we don't have someone calling in with their goal. I'm actually going to be a little bit selfish and look for help with my own goal for 2020. That is how to become an ethical eater without compromising my nutrition. As events this January have made brutally clear,

thinking about how our individual actions impact the planet and the other humans we share it with isn't just a nice or virtuous thing to do. It's essential. But actually how we do this is really bloody confusing. Do you hop aboard the veganary bandwagon with hundreds of thousands of others or when you consider the avocado air miles is it actually less harmful for the planet to eat food that's grown rude in the UK? It's confusing. So today we're aiming to get some much needed clarity on what ethical eating looks like and to arm you with the knowledge you need to eat

in a way that supports the planet's health and your own. I'm very excited to say that here today to cut through the confusion around eating ethically is one of the foremost experts on the topic Rosie Green, Assistant Professor in Nutrition and Sustainability at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Hello, Rosie. Hello, and well done for getting through my very wordy job title. Oh, no, I love it. I was going to say it's so cool. So neat. It was a very cool job title. Obviously, this is an area that's really buzzy at the moment.

How did you get into it? Why was this something that you wanted to study? Essentially, I trained in health research generally. and I knew I wanted to do a PhD because I wanted to know more about the ways that people's various living circumstances can affect their health and I ended up doing a PhD that was quite food related

it was to do with a famine that happened in the Second World War on the Channel Islands where people were really starved of food because of the war and that got me really excited about the impact that people's nutritional circumstances have on their health all the way through their life and after I did that I started looking at sustainability and food and did some work on the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with diets. And basically the aim was to try and figure out whether there are

win-win situations where you can improve both your health and the impact that you're having on the planet through making dietary changes. And it's gone from there, basically. That's what I've been doing for about the last eight years. Fantastic. Thank you. For me, I've got a long and complicated relationship with ethical eating. I was raised vegetarian and vegan. I flitted between the two for most of my life. I now eat fish. So I've been brought up with an understanding of these issues and as a health journalist, I'm thinking about nutrition and reading about it all the time. And I find this really confusing. And there's a sense that when you're trying to almost like do the right thing with your food, you'll focus on one thing and then only to be told that actually

by eating in that way, it's causing a problem that you didn't really think about elsewhere and it just feels a bit like an unwinnable game of whackamol. Why is it so confusing to eat ethically? I think you've put your finger on a problem that a lot of people will really feel is true for them as well. And it's because we have a really complicated global food system now. So people are making individual decisions, but also there are huge parts of that system that individuals are not in control of. There are large multinational corporations and governments and trade laws that are in control of those other parts of the food system.

And we as consumers can only do so much. We can't completely reshape the food system all by ourselves. Having said that our actions can make a difference. And the way that I like to approach it is to think about positive things that people can do that will improve their diet and improve their health and are also likely to have a positive impact or minimize a negative. negative impact on the planet. Okay and can you tell me I've reported on this in women's health I think last year and I think you were included in that piece and the way that you broke it down that I found really helpful was talking about the three strands of ethical eating I'm wondering if you could

go you could share that with our listeners. Yeah so there are there are three main aspects of eating ethically I think and that is to think about the impact that you're having on people people that make our food, animals, the animals that go towards our food, and also the planet as a whole. So, you know, in terms of people, then you want the people that grow food to be able to make a decent living out of it and to be treated fairly. In terms of animals, you want animal welfare standards to be as high as they possibly can be. And in terms of the planet as a whole, I mean, there are greenhouse gas emissions from food. Food uses water. Food uses a lot of our land. And so there are a whole load of complex considerations to take into account there as well.

Yeah. And I think there's something interesting in the relationship between healthy eating culture and ethical eating. I think it's fair to say there's a bit of a complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship between the two. I'm thinking here of the news that was out earlier this week about almond milk in California, wiping out billions of honeybees. And obviously almond milk is something that quite a lot of people who choose a vegan or a plant-based diet will opt. for, is our appetite for these newly popular health or wellness foods having a disproportionately damaging impact on the planet? I think it is really difficult and I think people get really

disheartened when they read things like that because they're trying to do something good. So they're switching from cow's milk to almond milk because they think that's a good thing to do for their health and a good thing to do for the planet. And so to hear things like that is obviously really disheartening for people. I think there will always be those sorts of effects because of the complexity of the system that I was talking about. So suddenly when a new industry grows exponentially because there's a huge new demand for it, that's going to have impacts that were not necessarily foreseen. We know, we do know that nuts use a lot of water and that's a really difficult thing because nuts are healthy and sizes are telling us to eat more

nuts and seeds all the time. But I think, I think balance is really important for these things. So if you're eating a really widely varied diet and you're not concentrating too much on one thing or another, then I think that's a good place to start from. So there are foods that you would want to really minimise and there are plenty of other plant milks that you can try that are not, that are not made for almonds. Which one, sorry, this is a really, I'm phrasing this in a very basic way, but is there an alternative milk that is the best in terms of its eco-creds? It's quite difficult. I personally, I'm drinking oat milk at the moment, but I have heard slightly less positive news about oat milk.

Oh, no, you're joking. Oh, no. What is it? A lot of oats are grown in this country, which is great. Yeah, that's right. But they can be not so sustainable in terms of the resources that are being used to produce them. But I think the thing it's important to remember is that it's not just about the food, it's about the production practices. and sensible companies and sensible governments will regulate to make sure that the practices that they're using are better for the planet. And so it's not necessarily the food that's bad.

It's, for example, California almonds are being artificially irrigated by loads of water. So it's not necessarily that almonds are bad. It's that they're being grown in huge quantities on ground that doesn't really sustain them very well. So I think it's important to bear that in mind that you can try and model, the types of food that you're eating a little bit, but it's not that particular foods are all bad.

It's all about moderation and about thinking about where they're coming from. Yeah. And when you say where they're coming from, is that a case of just reading on the packet? Yeah, I mean, I think you'd be paralysed within decision if you had to go and trawl the internet for hours before you went shopping every single time for every food. But the country of origin is a really good start and also looking at the season as well. If you're going out and trying to buy strawberries in January, there's probably a good chance that those strawberries are going to come from quite far away because that's just the way that the growing seasons work. So you can look at the country of origin for a bit of information on what seems sensible and what doesn't seem sensible. Yeah. And prioritising, I guess, then, the times if I don't know, say if you're making a dessert or something in it involves strawberries,

prioritising maybe when you're going to buy something that involves quite a lot of food miles. Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, food miles are a difficult issue because sometimes, for example, you might want to get food from Europe because if you get it from the UK, it's going to be grown in a greenhouse and you don't necessarily want to be putting all of that energy into growing things in greenhouses where they're growing perfectly well outdoors with much less energy put into them. And then they can come by train or by boat to this country and the food miles are actually not too bad. but I think it's yeah I think a lot of the time common sense can cover a lot of these things often it's actually more satisfying

to eat a bit more seasonally I've discovered that you know I want a lot more soup that's made from root vegetables in the winter because that's quite hearty and I want a lot more fruit that's naturally outside in the summer so a lot of these things

people will find that they quite enjoy maybe if they get a bit more into doing this that way because technically in the Western world now we're in a place where you can pretty much whatever you want, can't you? And it can have come in from anywhere. So it's kind of almost putting those restrictions back in place. And you're saying you actually kind of find that a little bit satisfying.

Yeah, I think there are a lot of positive things that come along with that. It's, you know, positively choosing what you want to eat because actually it will taste better as well. Because fresh fruit that hasn't come a huge distance and meat that's been reared outside with higher animal welfare standards, it does tend to taste better. So you can modify maybe some of the amounts of meat, for example, that you're eating and eat higher quality meat in smaller amounts. And actually, you'll probably enjoy it more anyway. Yeah.

And going back to your point about common sense then, if we strip things back and we look at a diet that's good for planetary health, then we look at a diet that's good for human health, how much crossover does there tend to be between the two? In our research, we've found that there's a reasonable amount of crossover. So one of the first things that we discovered when we were looking at UK diets is that the average UK diet is not good for people. It's, you know, it's a leading cause of disease in this country, it's poor diet. When we looked at, we decided to look at the number of people in the UK that we could find from a national survey that were meeting all of the dietary guidelines they should be eating.

So not too much fat, not too much sugar, enough fruit and vegetables. and out of a sample size of about 5,000 to 6,000 people, we only found seven people that were actually meeting those guidelines. And was this a sample that was taken from across the country? Yeah, this is across the nation, yeah. So that was quite surprising to us, the extent to which people are actually not getting the nutrition that they need. And if more people were to meet those guidelines,

we found that actually you'd get about a 17% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from people's diets, just even without thinking. about deliberately reducing them. And you'd also increase life expectancy by about eight months. So that was one of the win-wins we were looking for. And it's a definite situation where improving the health of the diet that you're eating. Because a lot of it's to do with more fruit and vegetables and a bit less meat,

that will automatically improve your health and will automatically be better for the planet just without even thinking about anything else. And in simple terms as possible, because I know people, we know that we've heard that eating less meat is good for the planet. Can you sum up why? Yeah, so meat and dairy, in particular red meat, produce a lot more emissions than other foods because partly because they're an inefficient way of eating the nutrients that we need. So all the nutrients have to go through the plants and then they're fed to the animals

and then we only eat part of the animals. So it's not a very efficient way of getting energy into a person. and also because probably a lot of people know about methane from cows and sheep and that's going straight into the atmosphere. And also another really powerful greenhouse gas is nitrous oxide, which is produced from manure and also from fertilizer. And so all of those greenhouse gases are coming together to make particularly meat from animals such as cows and sheep

a much, much bigger source of greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based foods. So without even getting really far into the specifics of a vegan diet, generally across the board, is it fair to say that then reducing your meat and reducing your dairy is a good shout? Yes, I would say so, yeah. There's been some recent work by some other scientists' work in my field that looked at lots of different diet types. So, you know, pescatarian versus vegetarian versus vegan.

And the diets with the least meat and dairy in them were found to be the ones that had the lowest emissions. And that doesn't even necessarily just apply to vegan versus vegetarian. They found a diet that there was two-thirds vegan, showed a huge, huge decrease in emissions. And also a low food chain diet, which is, I don't know whether it's going to be a fad or not, but it's... Yeah, what's that? I've not heard of that before. It's a diet where you eat as far down the food chain as you can, basically. So it doesn't have to be plant-based, but low food chain animals would be things like

bivalve mollusks, so, you know, cockles and muscles. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And insects are very low down the food chain. So you can get protein from those animal-type foods. Yes. And it's not a completely vegan diet, but the emissions are really low because those animals are converting the energy much more efficiently than an animal that's much higher up the food chain like a cow or a sheep. Interesting. Yeah, I accidentally had a bite of a cricket. It was like,

it was a cricket protein bar that got sent into the office. I think it's one of the most dense things I've ever eaten. That's so interesting. Can I ask you about the planetary health diet? Can you tell me a bit about what some of the key elements of that are? Yeah, so this was developed by some scientists at Oxford University, among other places. And they wanted to look at a diet that would keep us within what's called the planetary boundaries, which are a number of different areas where they've identified that we're in danger of overcoming the capacity that the planet has to support us. So it's areas like water use and land use and pollution in various areas as well as greenhouse gases. So in terms of all of these different boundaries, they identified a diet that would help us.

to not exceed them. So to be sustainable and, you know, to keep living on a planet that's supporting us in a healthy way. And that diet is sometimes called a flexitarian diet as well or a planetary health diet. It's got a few different names. And it's basically not a vegan diet, but it involves eating small amounts of meat and dairy and a lot of fruit and vegetables, limiting sugar, and that sort of thing. And it's a diet that there's been some controversy over it over whether it's applicable to people living all over the world,

which I think is fair, because in high-income countries, our diets are very, very high in meat and dairy already and in a lot of other low- and middle-income countries. They're not eating anywhere near so much. Yeah, that's a really good point. And some people are undernourished, and actually animal-sourced foods

is a really good way of getting calories into people if they're undernourished. So I think different diets should apply to different people, depending on what their nutritional needs are. But I think this idea of a sort of planetary health diet is a really positive one because it shows people that they can have a positive impact and actually that there are a lot of different ways within that diet that you can eat. So you can still eat the things that you enjoy. You just might want to choose more of some things and a bit less of others. At Desjardin, we speak business. speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice,

and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Yeah, and it's not prescriptive. And there's no identity politics. or tricky rules tied up with it. Now I want to look at small shifts that people can make in order to become a more ethical eater. There are a ton of labels on our foods.

Which ones are the most important to pay attention to? I think, again, it comes back to those sort of three domains of ethical eating. So to improve the life conditions of people that are making your food, I think fair trade is still very important because that does help to minimise the problems for example, with things like quinoa where people are growing food and they're having to sell it and not get a fair price for it instead of actually eating it themselves. It's a bit of a minefield, again, because it comes back to the complex food system that I was talking about.

So you can't predict what is going to happen when a food starts to become more valuable because it's dependent on so many different factors such as the government that's in place and how well that government protects its people and the different trade arrangements that the different countries have. So in some cases, it would be nice for some foods to become more valuable because the people growing them then are able to get themselves out of poverty

because most smallholder farmers are living in poverty and you want them to have a fair amount of money for the food that they're growing. But, yeah, in some situations, foods that have become cash crops and very valuable to people have prevented the people that are growing that food from from eating it themselves, which is really difficult. But I think that's one of those issues where it's really difficult to take a stand alone as an individual because you can't know all of the consequences that your decisions are having on people. I think that's a really interesting point that you mentioned earlier as well.

It's almost, I think so much with this issue and I guess just so much in our culture generally at the moment, we're so focused in on ourselves. Like not even in a really narcissistic vein way that we are so important or whatever, but we do feel that there's a lot of pressure and our choices are very important, which obviously they are. But as you said, it doesn't live or die on whether you have almond milk or oat milk this morning. We don't need to beat ourselves up. Is that fair? Is that fair assessment?

I think that's fair. I think it's because, yeah, again, you'd be paralysed if you tried to make every decision a perfect one. All we can do is really try and minimise the damage. that we do and try and maximize some positive opportunities for change that there might be. And those are probably different for everyone. So, sorry, I slightly wandered away from the topic of labels, but I think labels... No, I mean, so did I. But I think labels are a really useful way of people getting some confidence that what they are doing

is to the best of their knowledge, a positive contribution rather than a negative one. So, yeah, the fair trade label is a good example of that. and organic standards such as the Soil Association, particularly for animal products, can be really useful, I think, because an organic label will guarantee a basic standard of animal welfare that might not be there if you were choosing meat or dairy from another source. So that's a useful one, particularly for animal source foods, I think. And I think a lot of people don't necessarily realise,

the information is not out there in an easy to access form that basic animal welfare standards are not that good. Yeah, yeah. They're better in the UK than they are in most other countries in the world, but actually there's still, the minimum standards are still not great. And so if that's something that is particularly close to your heart in terms of ethical eating, but you're not quite ready to be a vegan, that's a sort of in-between step that I think you can take is to try and maybe eat less meat and less dairy and make sure that the

ones you do eat have those higher standards. Yeah. And in terms of choices you can make as an individual, I also think it's really valuable to support small businesses that are doing things that you like. So there are farms in the UK now that are pioneering new methods of livestock farming. So they're keeping the calves with the adult cows instead of taking them away. And they're, you know, using fewer antibiotics on their animals and they're feeding them more on grass. And so if you decide to give your money to those sorts of small businesses, then that's a really positive thing that you can do that will help those techniques hopefully get adopted more widely in the food system. Yeah. Voting with your with your income basically to support kinder methods.

Yeah. It's the sort of a flip side of boycotting foods that you think are unethical, which can be difficult because there are so many. So in a more sort of positive way of thinking about it, choosing to spend more money than you would from a supermarket on cheese that's from an ethical dairy farm might be a really good way to feel that you're doing something positive. Yeah, it feels so much more empowering, even just hearing you say that. So we've talked about what we can eat, but it's not just the foods we eat or what we buy when we shop. It's kind of all about how we're.

we do it comes into it. What are some of the key things you think that people can do to upgrade like the ethics of their food shop? I think obviously food waste is a huge one as well. So try to minimize the amount of food that you're wasting. And you can, there are so many ways to, that can help you do that now. You know, you can use recipe apps where you've, you put what you've got in your cupboards into an app and it will tell you what you can make with those foods. You can buy frozen food that will keep for longer. That's quite a good way of minimizing those. And sometimes it's more nutritious. Yes, can be if it's frozen quickly. Studies have shown. I can't quote a specific one. We'll put a specific one in the show notes. Yeah, that can also be true. So there are

lots of different ways that you can try and minimize the amount of food you're wasting because we do waste a lot of food, particularly in high-income countries like this one. And the more food we waste, the worse the impact on the planet. Composting the food, the food. that you do waste is a really good one because you really don't want that food waste going into landfill. That's really bad for greenhouse gas emissions. So if you can, if you have a, you know, just a step back. So why is compost going into a landfill? Why is that bad for greenhouse gas emissions? What's the process? So if you put food waste in your normal bin and it gets taken away, it will end up in a landfill site and then it won't break down properly because it will be next to a load of inorganic material.

And so rather than going to make soil, it will release those gases into the air. And that's not what you want to be happening, really. So if you put your food waste into compost, either if your council collects it from your house or if you can give it to local businesses or you can put it on your own garden, that's a really good way to reduce the impact, the environmental impact of what you're doing with food. Brilliant. I think there's something that seems to come into it a lot is, this and I guess it's something that we all have to wrestle with as we live such kind of fast on

the hoof types of lives is that it does seem to require a little more planning doesn't it? You're carrying a bit more to work because you've got your coffee cup, you've got your water bottle, you've got your Tupperware of lunch so you're not buying disposable plastic container. Any advice almost maybe on adjusting? Yeah, it is an adjustment and in many ways it's going back more to the ways people used to do things when they had to go to four or five different shops to get the weekly shopping in instead of just one. And they had to think about things much more

because there was less ability to store food. But I've, so I've been doing this for the last few years and moving at a sort of gradual pace in a slightly different direction. And I think it doesn't have to be all the time. You can do what you find manageable. But for me, because I have children and I have a busy job and I travel and I have to negotiate all of those things, For me, if I can do 80% of the time what I would like to be doing,

which means planning a bit more and cooking more from scratch and using leftovers, then the other 20% of the time, when I just don't have time, because I need to get something on the go or I need to get those boiled eggs or whatever, I sort of I let it go because I think, you know, you can't always be, it's difficult to always be perfect. Totally. That's such a good point. It's like with nutrition generally,

if you try and eat perfectly, you know, that has really bad consequences because you can get obsessive about it and you can't eat perfectly. And I guess just as you can't eat perfectly, nutritionally speaking, you can't eat perfect or live perfectly from a sustainability perspective. Yeah, I think it's all a sliding scale. I think there does need to be a big change in the way that we eat. But a big change starts with a small change and a lot of people making a small change and then it snowballs. then there's a sort of a tipping point where things really start to change. So I think, you know, it's fine to start doing it one day a week or two days a week. I often try to be vegan whilst I'm at work and then I cook something that's not vegan at home, for instance.

That sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or I know that people tend to do that thing almost that they'll be vegetarian when they're cooking and then they'll go out to eat at the restaurant and then that's when they'll have a steak or whatever or that's when they'll have the meat that they wouldn't normally cook for themselves. Yeah, and I think all of those changes can still make a huge difference because if you're just one person doing something, it is small, but if a lot of people do that, suddenly the change is big.

And that's when the institutions and the industry starts to change as well, which is much more powerful. Yeah. Brilliant. So positive action, positive personal action, without too much going down a rabbit hole and self-blame. That's the aim. Perfect.

Okay, so just to recap then, we're talking about these small changes that people can make. We've already spoke about eating less meats, cutting down on dairy, making conscious choices about where to spend your money in terms of places that have more ethical production or farming processes. What else? I think it's good to just try and be a bit aware of all the different impacts that food can have. and to think more about food, maybe again in a way that people used to, to think about food as more than just fuel, but as something that's to be enjoyed,

that a lot of people have put work into growing and making for you to eat. And I think that goes a long way towards maybe cutting down on some of the habits that are a bit more damaging. So, for example, you know, we know that fast food is not very good for us, but it does give us a really instant kind of good feeling. but actually when you stop and have a think a bit more about where that food's coming from and who's made it and what the practices were that were involved in making that food, sometimes it doesn't seem so appealing anymore.

Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a lot to be said for slowing down and thinking a little bit more where possible because food is really important and farmers are really important and without it, we're in big trouble. So I think food is something that's worth a bit more thought. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Rosie, for coming on, Going for Goal. I've really, really enjoyed that conversation. Pleasure.

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