You probably think often about whether your food tastes good or not. You probably also think about whether or not your food is good for you. How often do you think about whether your food is good for the planet? Probably not so much. It's worth thinking about, especially in this day and age.

Healthy Diet

Obviously first and foremost, a diet that isn't good for you isn't going to be good for the planet either. You want to make sure that your diet meets all your nutritional needs, both in terms of caloric intake but also in terms of vitamins and minerals. Many people turn to supplements to help ensure a complete and healthy diet, and that may be the right choice for you as well. Make sure to ask what is thrive and other supplements, and find out what they can do to meet your nutritional needs.

Human Costs

You also want to make sure that your diet isn't doing harm to your fellow humans either. Humanity is part of this planet, and plays an important role in its health and its sickness. Vegan and vegetarian diets, for example, are often touted for their ecological friendliness, but what is the human cost of growing and acquiring all those fruits and vegetables. How are they grown and who is harvesting them? Were they paid enough? What about the land itself? What habitats had to be cleared to make room for these fields and how are they watered? Over-farming grains, vegetables and fruits can cause just as much ecological damage as any other kind of mass farming.

Emissions

Emissions are another potential source of damage. You may have heard how farming certain meat sources like cows contributes to greenhouse gasses. There are also transportation costs to consider. The farther your food travels, potentially the more emissions are put out to get it to you, depending on how it was transported. On the other side of the equation, the trees that are often cleared to make room for farmland might otherwise be taking greenhouse gasses out of the air. Ask yourself what your food production companies are doing to reduce and counteract their emissions and other waste.

Waste

Another consideration, and one that you have significantly more control over, is the amount of waste involved in the food you eat. This includes food waste, of course. Make certain to use your produce and other non-shelf-stable foods before they go bad to reduce waste of that kind, but that isn't the only kind of waste. Think about much packaging you throw away at the end of cooking a meal. That is potentially a lot of trash. Some of it may be recyclable and some of it may come from recycled materials itself, but much of it is non-recyclable and goes straight into the dump.

Sustainability

Sustainability should be your watchword when you're looking to make your diet more eco-friendly. This encompasses a sustainable amount of waste, both from physical waste and harmful emissions. It also includes policies that uphold a sustainable process of farming, both for the environment that is being farmed in but also for the people who are doing the actual farming. Sustainability comes right down through the supply chain, last but not least, to you. An eco-friendly diet must be sustainable for you, both in terms of its economic cost and its nutritional costs.

A diet that is healthy for the planet as well as healthy for you is well worth attempting to create. There's a lot to consider, certainly, and a perfect choice may not exist, but it's well worth trying for anyway.