Should you become a vegetarian?

You know when you were a child and you realised that eating the tasty meat you were eating actually came from animals, and you questioned whether to stop eating meat all together? But then of course you were told that meat provided important benefits (especially protein) which were crucial to you growing up, so you found a way to be okay with it. Well now there is another reason why your diet should exclude delicious meaty goodness. Surprisingly enough it has to do with our climate!

As mentioned in the previous blog, methane has natural and anthropogenic sources. However in one specific case a source can be called both natural and anthropogenic, and that is of the excretion of methane during digestion of cattle species. Therefore whereas digestion by cattle is a natural occurrence which will occur even without the help of mankind, the demand for meat by humans has meant that there has been a dramatic growth in cattle to sustain the demand. Thus, the amount of methane being given off by these animals is copious.

To meat the demand of our ever growing, meat craving population, an increasing number of cattle are needed every year. Figure 1 below, shows us that whilst population has more than doubled, meat supply (in response to demand) has quadrupled in almost 50 years. So the meat being consumed has increased not only in total but also per person.

Figure 1

It is known that cattle will lose about 6% of their energy from food intake by emitting methane.Mc Ginn, 2004 examined the outputs of methane from 'beef' cattle when fed various diet supplements.  They discovered that sunflower oil decreased methane emissions by 22% ! This is a very interesting discovery, as it shows that there are simple ways of mitigating emissions, in a  relatively cost effective way. This is important because in the future cattle will definitely increase to meet demand, and consequently emissions will increase. Therefore if methane emissions of all cattle could decrease by 22% we could reach lower pollution levels than present.