Finding balance with the environment

The environment around us provides almost everything we need to live healthy and sustainable lives. But its resources are dwindling. In the current day and age, many are looking for solutions that allow us to live more harmoniously with our environment.

Our existence must be symbiotic with the world that supports us. This way, we can live responsibly and continue to enjoy the benefits of our world for many years to come.

Below are a few things you can do to start living more harmoniously with the environment.

Forests provide a healthy ecosystem for our physical health

OneTreePlanted – an organization dedicated to sustaining forest environments – explains that trees remove air pollutants that hugely impact our physical health, including but not limited to “bronchitic symptoms, increased risk for glaucoma, heart attacks”, and others.

Additionally, it confirms research has also found trees to “help hospital patients recover faster by reducing diastolic blood pressure and stress”. Moreover, spending a short time in forests surrounded by natural beings “can help reduce anger, anxiety and pain, inducing relaxation.”

Forests aid our mental health

Psychiatrist Marlynn Wei writes in a Psychology Today article that walking through a forest for only 15 minutes “can result in a better state of mind.” Wei references a study that explains that people who walked in a forest compared to those in the city “experienced significantly less negative feelings such as tension, anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion” and more feelings of calm and ease.

Read more about how forests can aid our health in the LiveWell app.

Can a diet save the planet?

The way we are eating right now may not be sustainable and is probably destroying the planet.

As noted by researchers and health expert Atif Kukwaswadia, our current diet and food system places “a disproportionate burden on the planet, mainly because agriculture occupies nearly 40 per cent of global land and is responsible for up to 30 per cent of greenhouse emissions and 70 per cent of freshwater usage”.

“This has effects on other species, with land use threatening some with extinction, and overfishing increasing the environmental burden on marine systems…. Since the food system is predicated on what people consume, changing diets is the first step to changing the priorities of our food system,” writes Kukwaswadia in PLOS.

What’s the Planetary Diet?

In 2021, the EAT-Lancet Commission released a study titled Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, which endorses a “planetary health diet” said to be the most sustainable diet for the environment and human health.

According to various health reports, including consumer food awareness site Safe Food, the aim of the study was to find a healthy and sustainable diet that could feed 10 million people by 2050 while addressing the major role farming plays in climate change, pollution, and wildlife destruction.

The researchers who developed the diet believe it will do just that.

Read more about the Planetary Diet in the LiveWell app.

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