Geagan - Go green, get lean: trim your waistline with the ultimate low-carbon footprint diet

Knowing where your food comes from can change your life.

Alice Waters

I wrote this book for my children.

As a dietitian with a successful corporate wellness practice, I had worked with thousands of people to help them lose weight, manage chronic disease, and improve their health through diet. I loved staying abreast of the latest clinical research on food findings, and then helping my clients incorporate the newest proven strategies or foods for effectively managing weight, fighting disease, and feeding their families soundly, while helping companies better manage their spiraling health-care costs.

Then I had children, and my world changed. Suddenly the issue of global health, always important but somehow easy to nudge into the backseat of day-to-day life, took on a clearer focus. In fact, there was an exact moment when I knew I was going to write this book. I refer to it as my PB&J moment.

It was the summer of 2007, and I was at the playground with my kids and several other moms and tots. After about an hour, we all pulled out snacks. I watched with fascination as one mom pulled out a premade, frozen, prepackaged, crustless PB&J on white bread, cut neatly into a little white circle and prewrapped in a clear plastic package. It was a little diskette of technology, convenience, and food product for a little boy to snack on.

In truth, this particular mom, like all of us, was only trying to do the best thing for her kids while balancing a time-strapped reality. And up until that moment, I had been equally guilty in other ways, such as breezily making suggestions to clients to load up on single- serving, pre-portioned (which meant calorie-controlled) items as a dieters manna from Skinny Heaven.

But heres a rundown of what went through my head at that moment:

This PB&J moment got me thinking deeply over the next couple of days about the connection between the grocery aisle and Antarcticas glaciers. Could it be a lot closer than we realize? I decided to investigate further to see if I could make some different suggestions to clients to help them eat in a greener way.

And what I found appalled me.

The American diet is warming the planet.

Americans food choices are a significant driver of the globalwarming crisis.

Yes, it is our food choices, and all of the energy that it takes to give us these choices (including production, transport, processing, packaging, storage, and preparation), that is now the single largest contributor to global warming, eclipsing even our love affair with our SUVs. The average American diet creates 2.8 tons of CO2 emissions

The impact of these choices is now echoing around the globe, not just because our food is nowadays logging more frequent-flier miles than we are, with blueberries from Argentina and grapes from Chile, but because throughout the whole system of food production, from when it is produced to when we put it in our mouths, the amount of fossil fuel going into our food choices has outstripped the actual amount of energy in the food itself. Even something as seemingly innocuous as lettuce can require a river of petroleum to bring it to diners plates; the average head of lettuce grown in California and picked at the peak of ripeness ends up requiring nearly 60 calories of fossil fuel for every food calorie by the time it arrives on a diners plate in New York City. This is to say nothing of the thousands of highly processed foods that require barrels of oil to create but provide little return in terms of real nutrition.