Know Your Green Diets?

Going from an average meat-eating U.S. diet, where 47 percent of your calories come from animal products, at 2.52 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, to a lacto-ovo (dairy and eggs allowed) vegetarian diet where 25 percent of your calories come from animal sources, will drop you down to about 1.5 tons of emissions per year, saving about 1 ton per year. Of course, these numbers are going to be a little different for everyone, depending on how much meat you eat beforehand and how many dairy products you still consume but you get the gist of it. Cutting meat represents a huge change in your impact.

Read More: 6 (More) Reasons a Vegetarian Diet Can Help You Lose Weight, Save Money, and Save the Planet

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint by Half in Three Steps

According to Ani Phyo, one of the major changes she noticed on a raw food diet was how her kitchen garbage disappeared when she began eating only fresh whole foods. She was no longer buying nor disposing of processed food packaging and all the plastics and cardboards. She can make a meal for 300 hundred people and at the end of it will be left with organic compost. The compost is fed to worms who then create fertile soil for her organic garden.

Read More: We Like It Raw

Eat Raw, Go Green: Make These Curried Potato Chips

There are lots of ways you can eat less meat. You might want to look at a flexitarian way of eating, a largely vegetarian diet where you eat meat sometimes. Here are some tips on becoming a flexitarian or in general eating less meat from Planet Green's Kelly Rossiter:

Most North Americans eat far more meat than necessary. A serving of meat shouldn't be more than 3 or 4 ounces. That way on the days you do decide to eat meat, you are likely having less than you do now.

Do a two-for-one recipe: make one recipe and use the sauce for both meat and tofu. I recently made Beef Curry for our family and used the sauce for tofu for my son.

Read More: Green Your Brain: How Many People could be Fed if the US Turned Vegetarian?

Cut Global Warming by Becoming Vegetarian

Vegan wine sounds like a non-issue: it's made from grapes, so as long as you're not pairing that merlot with a steak, you're in the clear. But according to PETA, filtering the wine?to strain out protein, yeast, cloudiness, and other natural by-products?often means using animal-based fining agents, like egg albumen, gelatin, isinglass from fish bladder, and bone marrow. Vegan wines, on the other hand, use carbon, limestone, silica gel, and other non-animal products for equally smooth end results.

Read More: Top Green Wine Tips 7 Common Hidden Animal-Derived Ingredients to Avoid

Organic Wine Company Also Does Vegan

World Watch reports that the average American diet's ingredients typically travel between 2,500 and 4,000 kilometers, a 25 percent increase from 1980 alone. This average meal uses up to 17 times more petroleum products, and increases carbon dioxide emissions by the same amount, compared to an entirely local meal.

Read More: Living On The 100 Miles Diet

Living On The 100 Miles Diet, Part 2

A study in the April 15 edition of Environmental Science & Technology by the prolific Carnegie Mellon University researcher Christopher Weber found that food transport accounts for only 11 percent of food-associated greenhouse gas emissions, while production contributes a whopping 83 percent. Specifically, nitrous oxide and methane -- mainly byproducts of fertilizer use, manure management and animal digestion -- make up a far bigger piece of the emissions pie than emissions from transporting our food from faraway places, the study found.

Read More: There's Something About Dairy, Say WorldWatch

7 Low-Cost, Low-Emissions Foods

These are all famous raw foodists and so is ex-supermodel Carol Alt and Donna Karen. They love the diet because it keeps them slim and looking young. If you're considering living raw, make sure that your produce is purchased locally both for the heightened enzymatic value and the reduced impact on the planet.

Read More: Raw Food for the Rest of Us

Can Raw Food Go Mainstream? World's First Licensed Raw Academy

More and more people are choosing to skip the meat and animal products in order to reduce their carbon footprint. I rarely eat meat, for sustainability reasons, so the scare of not getting enough B12 hits home for me. Especially considering that Vitamin B12 is essential to your genetic cellular makeup. It's critical to ensure that red blood cells get enough oxygen to the body. Though this is certainly true for everyone, a deficiency is more common in vegetarians and vegans because B12 is found in animal products. Many vegans get B12 from reabsorption. Reabsorption, when the nutrient is reabsorbed in the body, is the reason it can take over 20 years for deficiency disease to develop in people changing to diets absent in B12. But in truth there is no whole food source of B12 for vegans so they must take a supplement in order to avoid a deficiency.

Read More: Vegetarians: Are You Getting Enough B12?

How to Go Green: Eating

Raising beef cattle is now the single-largest cause of deforestation in the Amazon, responsible for about 80% of new land cleared since reliable satellite records began being kept in the early 1980s. In fact the total land cleared for cattle pastures now is as large as the nation of Iceland. While this shouldn't be a shocker, considering that Brazil is the largest exporter of beef in the world, it's still a gigantic environmental problem nevertheless.

Read More: Reduce the Meat in Your Diet: Become a Weekday Vegetarian

Brazil Announces Plan to Slow Amazon Deforestation by 70 percent

Raw food diets include uncooked fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. The foods should not be heated over about 118 degrees but they can be dried. While the foods don't have to be organic, it's best that they are so that you're giving your body the healthiest for you and the planet, most nutrient dense foods possible.

Read More:

Try This Super Easy and Nutrient Dense Raw Tahini Dressing and Shoe String Veggie Salad

Seasonal Chilled Raw Watermelon Gazpacho and Avocado Basil Soup