Picking a healthy diet is good for the human body, but it might also be bad for the environment. Researchers from Vermont warned that healthy eaters are responsible for 39 percent of all food waste in the U.S., according to a LiveScience article.
In their recently published study, the research team discovered that healthier diets were linked to larger amounts of wasted food. They reported that fruits and vegetables comprised 39 percent of daily food waste.
Dairy (17 percent) and meat (14 percent) were two of the other foods that often end up uneaten and thrown away. (Related: Stretching your grocery budget AND helping the environment: Tips for reducing food waste at home.)
“Eating healthy is important and brings many benefits, but as we pursue these diets, we must think much more consciously about food waste,” said Meredith Niles, an ecologist at the University of Vermont (UV) and co-author of the study.
Niles and her colleagues looked up the 2015 results of the Healthy Eating Index, a survey of American diets take from across the nation. They also drew information from the “What We Eat in America” database run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Other governmental sources contributed data that the researchers used for their estimates of the total food wasted every day and every year in the U.S.