How to Eat Healthily and Reduce your Carbon Footprint

Changing your diet up and making some healthy changes is one of the most effective ways to reduce your impact on the planet. It’s also super easy – here’s how you can do it.

We’ve all watched the news reports, seen the documentaries, and read the headlines that say climate change is only getting worse. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the way we eat is seriously damaging the planet (and it’s not exactly doing wonders for our bodies, either…) so we wanted to share some tips for healthy eating and reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.

So what, exactly, is going wrong? Two things:

The food system is causing 26% of human-related greenhouse gas emissions
At least two billion people worldwide are malnourished

Food production is one of the largest causes of global environmental degradation, and with 21 of the top 34 causes of global deaths related to nutrition, it’s clear that the factory-farmed food we’re eating isn’t just bad for the planet – it’s not so good for us, either

Luckily, we’re not here to dwell on what’s gone before – we’re here to talk about what we can do next.

The good news

Given the connection between the food system and the demise of our environment (deforestation, global warming, biodiversity loss) we took a closer look at how we can help, but our main finding was that everyone – yes, everyone – can help reverse these trends with one simple choice:

Changing the way you eat is one of the simplest and most impactful ways to do good for the climate and your body.

Keeping climate change to a tolerable level is possible, eating for our health is achievable and lowering our carbon emissions can be simple. It all starts with changing the way we think about food. We’ve come up with a few simple solutions.

What can I do to reduce my carbon footprint?

1. Eat more plant-based meals

Eating two plant-based meals a day can cut your food-related carbon emissions by 50%. That’s massive.

Given that it typically takes 100x more water to produce a pound of animal protein than a pound of grain protein – and that a plant-based diet has been estimated to cut the use of land by up to 76% – introducing more plant-based meals into your diet is the single most important thing you can do to achieve a more nutritious diet and eat sustainably.

2. Make some healthy food swaps

Don’t worry, we’re not recommending everyone become a vegan overnight. Making simple adjustments to your regular diet can help you cut your carbon footprint and ensure you’re eating more of the good stuff, and less of the stuff likely to contribute towards heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancers, and more. A few examples of simple swaps you can make:

Red meat for poultry, dairy and fish, or – even better! – plant-based protein sources (grains, beans, pulses etc.)
Refined grains to wholegrains (e.g. switching white bread for brown bread)
Sugary drinks to water and infused fruit waters
Dairy products for plant-based milk alternatives

What we’re doing to be more sustainable

1. Reducing Our Footprint

Research carried out showed that Flush is low-carbon, high-nutrition supplement, but our mission is far from complete. We want to:

Have reduced our carbon footprint of our by 10%
Use 100% renewable energy in Flush HQ
List the carbon footprint for all current products on our packaging/website

2. Smart Packaging

The packaging we use is to cut down on food waste. That said, there’s more we can do here as well. We have committed to:

Offering our products in multi-use packaging wherever possible
Ensuring all of our packaging is 100% recyclable.

3. Sustainable Transportation

Transportation is another area in which we have looked to reduce our environmental impact. We’ve worked hard to relocate our distribution centres to slash the ‘food miles’ of our products in the UK and Europe by 7.9 million kilometres, and in the US by 254 million kilometres. Not only is this better for the environment, but it means we can deliver you Flush much faster.

4. Cutting Out Waste

With its long shelf life and flexible serving sizes, Flush already goes some way to cutting down on food waste, but we’re working with Fareshare to take our waste prevention to another level. Flush products that have not been sold in the UK and Europe and have less than three months before their best-before date are donated to charities and community groups such as school breakfast clubs, elderly lunch clubs, homeless shelters and community cafés.