Green Diet: 5 Steps to an Earth-Friendly Lifestyle that Reduces Your Carbon Footprint

If you care about the planet and want to reduce your environmental impact on the earth, you've probably made a lot of green lifestyle changes. You probably recycle, try to drive less, and conserve energy by switching to fluorescent light bulbs.

But have you thought about how your diet affects the environment? What you eat, and how you eat it, can impact your carbon footprint. Every choice you make affects the earth. Think about ways you can eat a green diet if you really want to live a green lifestyle.

Here's are five steps to save the planet with an ecologically-friendly, green diet:

5 Steps to a Green, Earth-Friendly, Natural Diet:

Step 1 of Saving the Earth with a Green Diet: Eat local food.

When you shop in the grocery store, choose local produce and products. Buying merchandise that has been imported costs thousands of pounds of carbon and fuel when the product is transported. Buying local reduces the pollution caused by transporting goods, and also helps support local farmers who are often ecologically friendly or organic.

Step 2 of Saving the Earth with a Green Diet: Avoid processed food.

Not only is avoiding processed food good for the environment, but it's also good for you. Skipping on processed foods helps cut out nasty food additives like sugar.

Step 3 of Saving the Earth with a Green Diet: Cut back on product packaging.

So much of what we buy is wrapped in plastic, cardboard, paper, adhesives and other unnecessary packaging. Be attentive to the product design when you're shopping. Choose products with minimal packaging, and check to see if what packaging it does have is made from recycled material.

Plastic packaging and other packing material often have chemicals that are potentially toxic. This can be dangerous, especially when purchasing foods that are heavily packaged and processed.

Step 4 of Saving the Earth with a Green Diet: Eat organic food.

This is an obvious tip to protecting the planet by watching what you eat. Vegetables sprayed with chemicals are often unhealthy for you, and also often leak chemicals into the soil and groundwater. Eating organic protects your body, and the earth, from toxic pesticides and fertilizers.

Step 5 of Saving the Earth with a Green Diet: Eat vegetables.

Meat production uses countless acres of land, causing topsoil erosion and water pollution, as well as heavy carbon production through the slaughtering, transportation, packaging and cooking of meat. It is much more eco-friendly to eat a vegetarian diet.

Even if you can't bring yourself to eat a vegetarian diet, strive to put more vegetables into your diet. Cut back on your meat consumption. Another side bonus is that pesticides are often densely concentrated in meat, but eating plants cuts back on exposure to such chemicals.

Save the planet, watch what you eat!

Every decision we make can be good or bad for the earth. Your diet is a big part of your lifestyle. Eat a green diet and start making a different for the environment.