A sustainable diet leaves room for two chicken breasts a week, study says

255 grams per week. That's the short answer to how much meat you can eat without harming the planet. And that only applies to poultry and pork.
Beef cannot be eaten in meaningful quantities without exceeding planetary boundaries, according to an article published by a group of DTU researchers in the journal Nature Food. So says Caroline H. Gebara, postdoc at DTU Sustain and lead author of the study."
Our calculations show that even moderate amounts of red meat in one's diet are incompatible with what the planet can regenerate of resources based on the environmental factors we looked at in the study. However, there are many other diets—including ones with meat—that are both healthy and sustainable," she says.

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A sustainable diet leaves room for two chicken breasts a week, study says

phys.org /news/2025-04-sustainable-diet-room-chicken-breasts.html

79 comments

I don't like these kinds of articles because they always have an undertone of making it a matter of personal consumer choice as opposed to systemic change.
- Systemic change doesn’t happen without political will. Political will depends on personal opinions. Try to bring in systemic change with an election win but not overwhelming support then you get reactionary backlash like we’re seeing right now.
  
  Which is why I think it's better to start with some kind of populist attack on the excesses of the super rich. How many beef burgers was Katy Perry's publicity stunt in low orbit?
- WRI published an interesting article on this subject a week or so ago:
  https://www.wri.org/insights/climate-impact-behavior-shifts
  Systemic pressure [e.g. voting / collective action] creates enabling conditions, but individuals need to complete the loop with our daily choices. It's a two-way street — bike lanes need cyclists, plant-based options need people to consume them. When we adopt these behaviors, we send critical market signals that businesses and governments respond to with more investment.
  WRI's research quantifies the individual actions that matter most. While people worldwide tend to vastly overestimate the impact of some highly visible activities, such as recycling, our analysis reveals four significant changes that deliver meaningful emissions reductions.
  
  I like the bikelane analogy, actually.
  It shows clearly that (a) yes you do need activism (like Critical Mass) and a few crazy ones that will bike regardless of the adverse conditions, (b) political will to shift towards bikelanes, (c ) wider adoption but also sustained activism to build better bikelanes (not painted gutters on the side of stroads, but protected lanes, connected with transit).
  We definitely do not lack (a), but (c ) FOLLOWS (b). If you want to go from "just the crazies" to "everyone and their 5 year old", systemic change needs to be backed by very concrete top-down action.
  Without very meaningful (b), telling people to change their eating habits while stuff is otherwise the same is like telling people to take their kids to school on bikes next to crazy SUV traffic: it's not happening.
- If we simply stopped subsidizing meat consumption entirely the rising cost would shift more people to plant based diets.
  
  Nope, the government would get replaced at the next election, though.
Oh boy, the red meaters are going to downvote the shit out of this.
- Meh. I wouldn’t eat chicken these days either. You should see how it’s made. Corporate farming is abhorrent.
  
  I'm kinda in this camp as well. Barely eat any meat and the meat I do buy is from small local producers where I can meet (hihi) and greet the animals.
  
  i literally only have meat on special occasions because of this, the entire meat industry is horrible for animals, for your health (red meat) and for the environment.
- Those of us in the USA should be asking if we think meat will be safe now that many regulations have been removed.
  
  It won't. But neither will anything.
- They've gotta check with best friend's cousins former roommate who runs a "sustainable" slaughter house where they "exclusively" (once a year) source their meat.
- Vegetables aren't so scary, are they?
  
  Being vegan now for 6+ years seeing articles and comments about meat is dystopian as fuck. It only took me a week to go from full-blown carnivore to vegan so people struggling with this always gets me.
  
  I've moved to eating more non-meat than meat and skipping beef at home when I do, but I have never been able to fully convert. I was a pescatarian for almost 1.5 years in my youth and that was mostly doable, but still very tough and never really got easier.
  A number of the existing alternatives involve gluten which I can't have anymore (I rather liked seitan when I had it).
  I currently have a vegetable farm and, for as much of the year as I can, eat what I grow outside for veg so they're certainly not scary.
- We really don't need lab grown stuff when the meat alternatives on the market now are already so good
  If you haven't tried any yet, I highly recommend Impossible meat, it's virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Quorn is another great option.
  And on a budget, Seitan is also fantastic.
  
  I have to disagree with this. Personally, I think every chicken alternative I have tried has been bad, and more expensive. I certainly havent tried everything, but I try what I see readily available to me.
  
  Honestly I think the meat alternatives are pretty terrible compromises to the real thing. We should be cooking to enhance the veggies flavor instead of trying to force them to be meat.
  
  Honestly, just buy rice and beans and veggies. That plastic wraped stuff is dumb.
- Just buy beans.
  Stop pointing the finger at anyone but yourself.
Well, beef is already so damn expensive that I can't remember the last time we bought it.
Meat-wise It's just been a steady cycle of chicken, turkey, and pork at our house
I had no idea we were so environmentally avant-garde
- You're not avantgarde. Veganism is a thing.
- Good on you!
  When my wife and I started being conscious about our food intake, it wasn't too bad to give up red meat, and shrink meat portions / add veggies.
  It took us months of learning / trying new recipes to actually get to the point where we were consistently eating fewer than 14 meat-centric meals a week (lunch/dinner). Once we got comfortable cooking plant based dishes though, we had built up so much momentum that we went from 1 or 2 plant based meals a week to 100% in just a few weeks.
  It takes a long time to build up that comfort level, but at some point a switch just flips and the new "normal" is just as easy as what you were used to.
- We've cut way back on meat as well, though part of it for me honestly was the environmental impact. The only time we have beef is on special occasions and not at home (so a couple of times a year). Our main proteins are chicken (domestic), seafood, pork (split between domestic and Canadian depending upon what's available), and tofu in probably roughly that order. We have other sources of protein as well, but I think of those as the "mains" as it were.
The article barely touches on fish. It suggests fish, eggs, and dairy are mostly fine, but doesn't explicitly say that.
- Dairy has the same problems as beef. Remember, you also have to grow food to feed the food, so it's inherently a net loss of calories.
  
  And on the animal ethics side dairy is often considered worse - forced endless cycle of birth and separation of mothers from their calves, most calves slaughtered. It's not all sunshine and rainbows just because you aren't eating the corpses.
The most important part: what went into the calculation? There are plenty of things besides food that impact environmental sustainability, is diet alone sufficient to achieve it? Or did they just throw the rest out?
Has any society in human history been able to afford eating meat regularly? My great great great great grandfather’s journals talk about a lot of stew and veggies and he was wealthy enough that he founded a small city. We never ate that much meat.
- Subsidies and very, very cruel industrialization (torturous conditions).
  If laws were just and corporate socialism was just, it wouldn't be possible for most people.
- Yes, Inuit for example have a diet largely based on fish and meat. Steppe herders like mongols are another example of a culture with regular meat consumption.
  Medieval Barcelona had a higher meat consumption than today. The article also gives other examples of high meat consumption from medieval England and Vikings.
What about people that don't eat pork?
- I guess you can have 255 grams of poultry
  
  Or veggies. Veggies are always nice.
  
  #FreeTheRedMeat
Let's be honest about how unrealistic it is to expect people to voluntarily adhere to this. We need large scale lab meat asap
- What if I told you we already have beans..
  
  What if I told you beans don't taste like pork ribs? I love beans, but these things are not substitutes for one another, and insisting they are isn't going to make anyone become vegan.
  
  I'm not talking about forward thinking rational people like us. I'm talking about selfish everypersons that want to barbeque on the weekends and watch football eating chicken wings. We need to give them sensible substitutes or they won't change.
- Oh god no.
  Look at how much we fucked up natural meat with all the hormones and feed. Lab grown meat must be cheaper to make to compete with it, so imagine how atrocious the quality of it will be, from both health and nutrition perspective.
  
  The problem is that people won't give up personal luxuries for some vague 'save the planet' cause. This is simple fact. The only way to satisfy people's desire for meat and the planet's ecological balance is production of artificial meat.
  If you don't think it'll have the best texture or nutritional value, then that's fine. Do you think the people getting McDonald's cares about those things?
It's funny to think that you need communism for this kind of figure to mean anything.
Meanwhile, carnivore diet retards exist.
did they already publish an article beforehand on how many eggs are sustainable?
or have they solved the age-old riddle?
- The answer is zero
Dry ass nasty chicken breast. I'd rather some veggies, but it this allows BP to keep pumping oil into the Gulf then I guess it's fine.