Nutrition advice doesn’t usually make international headlines.

But when the Chinese Nutrition Society released its new guidelines in 2016, the world took notice. Why? It was all thanks to one key recommendation: to be healthy, people should eat more plant-based foods and less meat.

In fact, the guidelines suggest the average person should eat significantly less meat than they do now, moving instead toward healthy plant-based foods.

Decades of nutrition research support that advice. Eating too much animal protein is simply bad for your health. It can cause a whole range of diet-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure, and can lead to an early death.

As it turns out, eating more plant-based foods isn’t just great for our health. It also helps conserve natural resources. Producing plant-based foods requires far less land, water and energy than producing meat.

And since they are animal-free, plant-based foods are totally humane. To top it off, they are also less expensive—meaning you can save money while eating better.

To boost public health, thousands of institutions around the world are serving less meat and more plant-based foods. Many of the largest school districts in the United States have switched to serving only plant-based meals one day a week. So have major school systems in Brazil and government canteens in Chile and Belgium. Mexico’s federal social assistance program has called for the same, as has the public school system of Israel.

The world’s largest food service companies have also begun to focus on plant-based meals. Thousands of corporate cafeterias, hospitals and university campuses around the globe now take part.