Giving Compass' Take:

· According to a new report from Tulane University, a single daily substitution of poultry for beef in the average American's diet can reduce their carbon footprint from food by about half.

· How do our dietary choices affect the environment? What are some easy ways for Americans to change their diet and reduce carbon emissions?

· Here's more on how food choices can affect greenhouse gas emissions.

“We found that making one substitution of poultry for beef resulted in an average reduction of dietary greenhouse gases by about a half,” says Diego Rose, professor and director of nutrition at Tulane University School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine.

“To our knowledge, this is the only nationally representative study of the carbon footprint of individually chosen diets in the US,” Rose says. “We hope this research will raise awareness about the role of the food sector in climate change and the sizable impact of a simple dietary change.”

Food production is an important contributor to climate change, accounting for about a quarter of carbon emissions globally, researchers say. For the study, they examined the real-world diets of thousands of people in the United States.

Researchers used diet information from more than 16,000 participants in the 2005-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a portion of which asked participants to recall all the foods they consumed in the previous 24 hours.

The researchers then used this information to determine which foods had the highest greenhouse gas emissions and to calculate a carbon footprint for each individual diet.

Read the full article about dietary greenhouse gases by Keith Brannon at Futurity.