Plant-Based Diet Cuts Your Carbon Footprint In Half | New Study With Dr. Hana Kahleova
The Exam Room by the Physicians Committee
Physicians Committee
4.9 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
New research shows that simply choosing plant-based foods can slash your environmental footprint — and dramatically improve your health at the same time.
In this episode of The Exam Room Podcast, Chuck Carroll is joined by Dr. Hana Kahleova to uncover how different diets compare when it comes to land use, water use, greenhouse gases, and planetary health.
The results are stunning:
🌱 Vegan diets use up to 8× less land
💧 Up to 85× less water
🔥 Up to 28× lower warming potential
💰 Cheaper and healthier overall
🏋️ Participants in clinical trials lost 14+ pounds while cutting their carbon footprint in half
🌎 Review the study: https://bit.ly/PlantBasedCarbonFootprint
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Today, on the exam room. |
| 0:05.0 | The standard American diet needs eight more times more land compared with a vegan diet. |
| 0:12.0 | Subscribers toward the carnivore diet say, well, a vegan or a vegetarian diet is unsustainable because you need so much land to grow all of the fruits and vegetables. This is very much |
| 0:22.8 | counter to that. Welcome to the exam room podcast brought to you by the physicians committee. Hi, I'm |
| 0:31.5 | Chuck Carroll, raising health IQs coast to coast and around the world. Hi to the exam room. He's |
| 0:37.0 | listening in St. Paul, Minnesota, Raleigh, North Carolina, |
| 0:40.9 | and Maputo, Mozambique. |
| 0:43.2 | Wherever you are, we appreciate you, helping to make the world a healthier place. |
| 0:47.4 | This is episode 93 of season 8, number 692 overall. |
| 0:52.7 | And today's episode is going to be a brief one, but nonetheless an important |
| 0:58.1 | one, because we are going to be investigating how your diet affects not just your health, |
| 1:03.8 | but the health of the planet. New research published in JAMA Network Open shows that what you |
| 1:09.4 | put on your plate can slash greenhouse gas |
| 1:11.7 | emissions, save water, reduce land use, and even, yes, improve your health at the same time. |
| 1:18.9 | And here to break everything down, the lead researcher of that study, the incredible Dr. |
| 1:24.9 | Hanna Kaleova. She and her team have been leading the way |
| 1:27.7 | and understanding how plant-based nutrition |
| 1:29.5 | can transform both your health |
| 1:31.3 | and the health of the home that we all share. |
| 1:35.0 | And I'm also going to be sharing |
| 1:36.9 | my Thanksgiving thoughts after our conversation |
| 1:39.4 | and what I'm grateful for this year. |
... |
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