Have you ever thought of changing your diet to plant instead of meat-based? Probably not because of some devout explanation along the lines of “Kansas – history of mankind – ‘MERICA!”

It feels almost like a faux pas to decide to eat less meat – it’s just so not American. But the facts are astounding on why giving up meat, or simply eating less of it, could be an ethical obligation to the health of the planet and your own well-being.

Around 2.5 million years ago humans started eating meat. Fast forward all the way to today and understand that 10 billion animals are raised every year, solely for human consumption.

Just for reference, there are 7.1 billion people on this planet. Americans now eat twice as much meat as they did on average in the 1950s and twice as much as the recommended daily intake. Due to the evolution of factory farming over the last 40 years, the meat and poultry we increasingly over-consume is also generating the impossibility of humane meat production. Can you imagine how to grow, feed, slaughter and deliver 10 billion animals to markets and restaurants yearly? But let’s not bring PETA into this.

Why don’t we think more about that process, considering how much it affects most American’s daily lives?

Maybe because it’s our ideology and status quo? That’s not something that can be changed easily. But revolutions do happen. Social consciousness can and has been adjusted and shifted before. Maybe it’s time we all think about the amount of meat we’re consuming, seriously.

Some facts of our meat production and consumption include:

• The U.S. food production system currently uses about 50 percent of the total U.S. land area and 80 percent of fresh water.
• Animal production uses 100 times more water that plants do.
• The livestock produced in America eats seven times the amount of grains that humans consume
• Meat production produces more air emissions than all transportation combined: cars, trains, planes, buses, and boats.
• Because of selective breeding, growth hormones, genetic engineering and antibiotics, birds produced for slaughter are now 67 percent heavier than they were 60 years ago, cows now produce 2,320 gallons of milk per year, compared to only 665 gallons per year in 1950, and baby piglets gain 260 pounds in just six months.

The U.S. population has doubled in the past 60 years and is expected to double again in the next 70 years. The constant increase in probable demand for meat coupled with a fixed amount of natural resources begs the question: How will our planet sustain our current expectations for meat? Can it?

Besides thinking about saving the world, there are numerous individual health benefits to a mainly plant-based diet, and those are easy to look up. For example, a National Cancer Institute study of 500,000 people found that those who ate the most red meat daily were 30 percent more likely to die of any cause during a 10-year period than were those who ate the least amount of red meat.

I recently spent six months living on my own in Maryland, where I had ample time to evaluate my health and consumption choices (I was attending a military school and living in a hotel). I watched a TED talk by Graham Hill called “Why I’m a Weekday Vegetarian.” I tried it – I chose not to each meat on weekdays. And, taa-daa! It was awesome! I felt a lot better, had more energy and wasn’t eating nearly as much (which resulted in weight loss) because everything on my plate was made up of other things besides large chunks of meat.

It is difficult to maneuver through to meatless options at first, but I got over that hurdle after the first week. We are, in fact, very adaptable beings.

Once I returned to Kansas, I shifted back to eating meat whenever it was on the table. But I want to do it again, limiting my meat consumption regularly. It left a mark on my consciousness of eating meat and made me curious to find out more information about it.

Eating less meat is an individual choice that requires self-motivation, ideology changes and overall habit adjustment. But a collective choice by many people to eat less meat could have a quantifiable positive impact on our planet.