Figure 1

Key nutritional (main) and environmental (insets b–e) consequences of replacing all meat (blue) and beef only (red) in the mean American diet (MAD) with protein conserving nutritionally sound plant based alternative diets. Panel a presents mean ± 1 standard deviation nutrient deliveries by the 500 MC plant replacement diets (bar lengths and whiskers) for all nutritional attributes whose two delivery differences from the respective replaced meat both exceed 25% of the corresponding delivery by the truncated mean American diet (tMAD, the nutrient delivery by all 73 plant and animal food items we consider, more formally defined in the Methods section). Alternating gray shading helps distinguish individual attributes. Insets (b–e) show use of land and reactive nitrogen (Nr), greenhouse gas emissions, and irrigation needs by the meat diets and their plant based replacement (with color convention shown by legend). The percent of total per capita dietary use of the resource (associated with the truncated MAD) to which values correspond are indicated numerically.