Hannah Hoag, reporting for Nature News:
Over 50 years, an increase in fat and meat consumption has moved us further up the food web, with the global median human trophic level increasing 3% — or about 0.06 — during the period.
“It seems like a small difference, but when you think about how it’s calculated, it’s big,” says Thomas Kastner, an environmental scientist at Alpen-Adria University in Vienna, who was not involved in the study. An organism’s trophic level is calculated by summing the trophic levels of the foods in its diet and the proportion in which they are consumed. “A change by 0.1 means you are eating considerably more meat or animal-based foods,” says Kastner.