According to Ben Houlton, director of the John Muir Institute at UCLA Davis, reducing the amount of meat in our diets, specifically red meat, can help reduce our carbon footprint on the planet.

From the amount of methane naturally produced by cows to the greenhouse gases emitted during or as a result of food production, the amount of meat the average American consumes has a significant impact on climate change and the growing amount of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions.

While there other anthropogenic causes of climate change, cutting back on meat is a relatively simple and easy way to help the environment. While meat has become the staple of the average American’s diet, the amount of meat consumed on average is actually too much, around 2 times the recommended amount.

This is not to say that everyone should become vegetarian. Increasing the amount of fish and seafood in one’s diet and decreasing the amount of meat is a simple solution. In other words, you can still eat meat but try to eat it sparingly or in smaller portions.

In fact, the Mediterranean diet is the ideal diet to adopt. Not only is it beneficial to the planet, but it’s better for our health as well.

As stated before, the average amount of meat consumed in the United States is way more than actually needed, so adopting a Mediterranean diet of fish, seafood, some chicken, and a variety of plant-based foods can help reduce the risk of heart disease and diabetes.

With this type of diet, meat is not completely eliminated, it is just simply reduced. So you can still eat steak or hamburgers as long as it’s every once in a while and not every day.

According to Houlton, everyone adopting a Mediterranean diet would be “the equivalent of taking about a billion or more cars of pollution out of the planet every year.” While it is easy for us to often feel helpless about the impact of climate change, slightly tweaking our diets can have a significant impact and could potentially reduce global warming by 15% within the next 30 years.