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

114 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.
- Nope, the government would get replaced at the next election, though.
- But it has to be both if only because somebody has to show the way. Governments are not going to clamp down on meat ag when the whole electorate is cheerfully eating meat.
  Personally I see the argument "I can't do anything, it's about the system!" as a extremely convenient cop-out. Any system is made up of individuals.
  
  And all ills in the current world are the result of a very small set of people. A small group of people has been pushing meat eating like crazy.a small set of people placed tiny taxes on meat.
  A tiny percent of people are the reason why shipping is so big and so polluting. I can't change that, nobody can change that, except a tiny amount of people.
  A tiny percentage of people are the reason why we have such differences in wealth in society.
  It's a tiny amount of people that are the push behind all wars
  I could go on for a while but blaming the common people for the world's ills is disingenuous from my perspective.
  You want everyone to eat less meat? Start taxing meat properly. That requires politicians to do their jobs: make decisions that will make the world better for everyone, instead of making decisions that will make him or her get elected again.
  Most politicians are lazy and or think people are stupid. People would understand meat being more expensive if explanations of why would be clearly posted everywhere and alternatives would become cheaper and more abundant.
  Then again, we now live in a world where all idiots have a bigger megaphone than any scientist ever had. That too should change. I'm aorry, fuck your free speech, not everybody should be allowed to have a megaphone and talk about stuff, but that is a slightly different subject. Either way, that too could be solved by a tibt sliver of people
  
  Personally I see the argument "I can't do anything, it's about the system!" as a extremely convenient cop-out. Any system is made up of individuals.
  I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. If you look at the history of regulating substances or practices deemed harmful to the public, it's almost always led by governmental oversight. We knew asbestos was harmful way before it was regulated, but that didn't stop corporations from utilizing it in everything.
  The whole point of federal governments is to moderate corporations at the systemic level. Corporations know they can win the fight against individual responsibility, but they're terrified of regulation.
  We've already done this with the environment once before. The creation of the EPA popularized the push for clean air and water at a national level. Prior to the regulatory action there were of course people worried about pollution, but nothing really came of it until there was a regulatory body put in place.
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.
  
  You'll eat beef but not chickens? You consider cows to be treated differently to how chickens are treated?
- 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.
This has been my rule of thumb for a while. It should be clear as day that 9 billion people cannot all chow on hefty ruminant mammals. We would run out of land even before it cooked the climate.
The problem with chicken farming is the cruelty.
- If you’re only eating two breasts a week, people can spring for the free range stuff
- No, its also the environmental impact. We passed 350 ppm.
  The article is nonsense because it must be zero. We're already in a positive feedback loop. We have to reduce all emissions to zero to mitigate as much as possible. There is no amount of emissions that are acceptable.
  
  Yes but that logic changes the goalposts a bit. The question of how to undo existing damage, or what we should do ethically, is not the same as the question of what is theoretically sustainable.
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
- 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.
- You're not avantgarde. Veganism is a thing.
- 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.
- Typically we don't need to eat meat when we are wealthy; we eat unsustainable meat when there is a famine because we must.
- 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.
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?
- 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.
- What is wrong with beans?? You're never going to get lab meat as good as beans in your lifetime. It's a designer product for large children who are terrified of changing their diet.
What about people that don't eat pork?
- I guess you can have 255 grams of poultry
  
  Or veggies. Veggies are always nice.
  
  #FreeTheRedMeat
It's funny to think that you need communism for this kind of figure to mean anything.
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.
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
I want this paper without the "healthy" part. Tell us the limits of sustainability, then let people choose their own adventure, even if it isn't a good one by whatever arbitrary standard is set by the researchers for what health means to them.
- You want... less information? How does having information on health affects not "let" people make their own choices about their health concerns?? Indeed, how can they meaningfully make such decisions without that information?
  
  No I want more information. I don't want the current consensus of "healthy" between the authors, which may use arbitrary benchmarks, to prune down options that still satisfy a goal of sustainability.
  The research team's calculations take into account a number of environmental factors such as CO2 emissions, the consumption of water and land use, as well as the health impact of a particular diet. In total, they have examined more than 100,000 variations of 11 types of diets and calculated their respective environmental and health effects.
  One of these things is not like the others and it looks like it is used to prune the set of variations. Is unhealthy like I get scurvy and die? Or is it that it may correlate with high cholesterol? Or is it that you are at risk of foodborne illness for eating under cooked meat/eggs/seafood? "Healthy" could encompass any of those and that's nuts for data management.
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?
Meanwhile, carnivore diet retards exist.
Edit: yeah, pointless as always trying to have a discussion with vegans. 😐
- Veggie - not "mains", not complex enough
  Plant based meats - too complex
  IDK, but it sounds like you haven't really tried the full spectrum of offerings from plants. It's not just beyond meat and celery out there - There's a whole spectrum of flavors and if you want more, but not the full punch of a plant based meat, maybe try incorporating more variety into your plate
- Have you tried carrots? They taste like carrots.
  And beans, they taste like beans.