Eco-Friendly Diet

Eat Locally
Locally grown foods from farmers markets not only helps cut down on the fuel consumption through transportation and processes, but it also helps to support your town/city, helping provide jobs to farmers that have been doing their work for decades. Purchasing locally grown food offsets the carbon used during production and transportation, which has tremendous impacts on the environment and your health. Plan ahead and try freezing your favourite foods to have year-round, so that way you will have fresh out-of-harvest foods in matter of minutes.

Go Vegan: Eat Less Meat
Factory farms are one of the most polluted industrial sectors of the world, where the methane emitted by cows is 21 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. Factory farms pollute not only the air and water, but also your health through the hormones and steroids that are used to keep up with the world's meat demand. To just produce meat for one 150g hamburger emits the same amount of greenhouse gases as one six-mile car ride, and uses 2,400 litres of water. If going
meat-free is not your cup of tea, then consider purchasing local, grass-fed, pasture-raised meat to ensure an eco-friendly diet.

B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Bag)
They are everywhere we look, and as unlikely as it may seem, we cannot get rid of them. In the United States alone, over 100 billion plastic bags are used each year, however only 1 percent of these bags actually get recycled. Today, many superstores and shopping centres produce their own eco-friendly bags, often painted with beautiful green and blue colours. However, while many people are seen purchasing a reusable grocery bag, many more are seen carrying plastic bags
throughout the malls. Bringing an eco-friendly tote on your next shopping spree is one of the easiest earth-friendly changes you can make, the only hard part is remembering to bring it!

Plant Your Own Garden
One of the easiest ways to eat locally is to grow your own garden - it doesn't get more local than this! Even the smallest space can grow some herbs or veggies. Aside from it being locally grown, it is convenient to "shop" for what you need for your dinner preparations. Bonus: you know where the food came from and how it was grown, so there is no fear of pesticides of herbicides used for growth.

Use Reusable Bottles
Throughout the 70-million plastic water bottles that are used each day, only 14 percent get recycled. That places over 60 million water bottles in the landfill. While it takes 6 litres of water to produce a 2 litre water bottle, it is not just the water that is being used during the production phase. Large amounts of oil is used to produce, transport and dispose of them. An alternative eco-friendly way to water bottles is tap water. Although many people fear the safety of their tap water, it can easily be tested at a lab, or filtered using at-home water treatment methods such as Brita. Purchase stainless steel water bottles: plastic bottles may leak BPA (Bisphenol A) and aluminum bottles are feared due to the health concerns over Alzheimer's disease.

Eat Organic Foods
It is clear that organic food is grown without the use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers, being a good choice for both the environment and your health. It reduces the amount of chemicals released into the environment and increases soil longevity since the farming practices done on these farms ensures that the nutrients are released back into the soil at the end of each crop season. Many transnational corporations own farms on land where rainforests once thrived but were clear-cut in order to make way for large-scale farming. Destroying these rainforests increases the amount of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere as well as placing many inhabitants of the rainforest into extinction.