The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won't improve your health or save the planet

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Whatever your starting point in the debate around meat, this book will certainly enlighten your perspectives and sharpen your thinking around the many complex issues regarding health, nature, climate, policy, industry, science and media. And if you disagree with her conclusion I really suggest you read this book from cover to cover before making any judgements.

ITV This Morning: Author Jayne Buxton under fire for claiming

However a new report from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health Nutrition Coordinating Center found that most healthy milk alternatives made from plant sources such as oats, soy, or almonds don’t deliver the same nutrition as cow’s milk. Meat produced in the UK is among the most sustainable in the world. Taking into account grassland sequestration (the process by which grassland draws carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it in the soil, of which more in a moment), cattle and sheep account for 3.7 per cent of UK emissions. Even excluding sequestration, cattle and sheep account for just 5.7 per cent of emissions. Even if we take the highest estimate, the CO2 cost of a serving of beef is utterly dwarfed by the per-person CO2 cost of the flight (1.6 tonnes, or 1,600kg, for a one-way flight). Equally specious is the concept of the Hollywood elite demonstrating their commitment to combating climate change by taking meat off the menu at the Golden Globes while travelling to the awards ceremony by private jet. She thinks we should all be grateful to animal rights activists, vegans and vegetarians for highlighting these issues. “That’s a positive contribution. The solution is maybe where we part company.” Very little meat consumed in the UK comes from systems that deplete rainforests and generate large amounts of emissionsThe Great Plant-Based Con: Why Eating a Plants-Only Diet Won’t Improve Your Health or Save the Planet by Jayne Buxton

The big idea: is going vegan enough to make you – and the

Organic goes a long way towards delivering a lot of the things we’ve identified as important to sustainability, but I’d like us to have a labelling system that enables people to know what herd their milk comes from,” he says. Many studies have demonstrated how meat and dairy contributes to carbon emissions – accounting for 14.5 per cent of all man-made emissions, according to the UN – but some believe cutting animal foods out and replacing them with plant-based alternatives does not have the effect some would have us believe. For a very long time the impact has been exaggerated,” says Jayne Buxton, the author of The Great Plant Based Con, “and the nutritional costs of the diet understated or even ignored. As a result we have this overwhelmingly dominant narrative that’s taken hold that most people think the best way to improve the planet and personal health is to go vegan.”Buxton supports the transition towards farming regeneratively, which aims to restore soil quality and biodiversity while producing sufficient food of high nutritional quality. “British farming is going well compared with the rest of the world.” As we try to work out what’s best for our health, and that of the planet, many of us have been tempted away from cow’s milk.

The Great Plant-Based Con by Jayne Buxton | Waterstones The Great Plant-Based Con by Jayne Buxton | Waterstones

I may have been able to struggle through the last six hours of a nineteen hour book, despite the problems noted above, but the narrator is The scientist are world class leaders in their respective fields, and know what they are talking about. When it comes to veganism, she is concerned that a diet requiring additional supplementation (plant-based diets are deficient in nutrients such as preformed vitamin A, B12 and D, iodine, iron, omega-3, several essential amino acids and zinc) can be held up as healthier than a balanced one that doesn’t. It used to be a simple choice between gold and silver top: today, a shopping catalogue wouldn’t go amiss when deciding what milk to buy. The research organisation Our World in Data, for example, has published two different estimates: 100kg and 60kg. The per kilo CO2 cost of beef in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at 40-50kg CO2e, versus 5-10kg in Europe. A report by the National Farmers’ Union estimates the carbon cost of British beef at 17.2kg (as compared with 46kg for the rest of the world).This isn’t a call to forks for you to head to your nearest all-you-can-eat­ ­steakhouse. Buxton would like to see everyone reduce consumption of meat from industrial farming and ­transition towards more sustainably raised meat, “which will likely mean consuming less”.