What is the true cost of eating meat? When looking at your diet through a narrow lens, one burger seems insignificant. Now, you throw a slice of cheese on the burger, thinking, who cares? Cheese doesn't even hurt animals, right? Wrong.

If the entire U.S. didn't eat meat or cheese for just one day a week, it would be the equivalent of not driving 91 billion miles or taking 7.6 million cars off the road. According to a report by the World Watch Institute, 51% of global greenhouse-gas emissions are caused by animal agriculture. This is more than the pollution from all cars, trucks, trains, and planes combined. Global warming is increasing at an exponential rate and if we, the human race, continue our current lifestyle, Earth faces inevitable mass extinction of life.

The greatest factor contributing to global warming is the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect explains the build-up of O3 in our atmosphere and how it creates an impenetrable shield around the earth that doesn't allow heat to escape our atmosphere. This then causes an increase in tropical storms and a loss of habitat in arctic areas creating a pH imbalance in the oceans. It seems obvious that this is an extremely important topic and should be immediately acted upon, especially when considering that Earth is currently the only planet capable of inhabiting multicellular organisms, including humans.

So what can you do?

A large misconception that negates the benefits of plant-based diets stems from the idea that you can not satisfy all nutritional requirements if you don't eat meat. While on a plant-based diet, one must be more careful and conscious of what foods they are consuming in order to fulfill the necessary nutritional requirements. This negative stigma against plant-based diets is not applicable to the solution at hand which is only requiring individuals to only skip one day of meat consumption. This is a valid drawback from plant-based diets but should not discourage people from lowering their intake.

By lessening your meat intake each week, individuals are given the opportunity to purchase higher quality meat with the same budget as a financial impact since you are purchasing pricey meat less frequently. Not only is this a positive personal gain, but also will result in less animal cruelty within the meat industry. This also will reduce the number of chemicals and unnatural supplements people will consume when they stray away from factory produce meat. This has a positive impact on an individual's hormones, internal pH balance, and digestive microbes.

In addition to eating cleaner, individuals will be consuming a wider range diet and will be exposed to alternative foods such as a higher intake of leafy greens which are rich in vitamins A, C, and K, fiber, and calcium. A diet with a large variety of nutritional value is known to benefit human health.

Here's what you should not do:

Pescatarian is a term for a popular diet for those not wanting to cut meat entirely out of their diet. As a pescatarian, one can continue to eat fish however they consume no other meat products. Recent news has exclaimed how important it is to reduce our pollution in order to decrease the rising rates of global warming. One popular tactic people have been emphasizing includes quitting the use of plastic straws. This obviously is helpful and beneficial to the cause, however, plastic straws add up to less than .03% of the pollution in the oceans. Additionally, 46% of the plastic found in the ocean is from fishing debris. Clearly, the reduction of seafood consumption will have monumental impacts on our environment compared to cutting out the use of plastic straws in your daily life. This proves that alternatives to becoming a full time vegetarian and/or vegan are not as beneficial to the environment but still have positive impacts.

I understand adopting a full-time plant-based diet is not practical and is unreasonable to ask. This being said, it seems that given our current climate circumstance, giving up meat one day a week should be feasible. The impacts of this lifestyle change could bring the global temperature back down to the sustainable 2 degrees Celsius above the natural temperature, saving the life on earth from certain disaster.