A breakfast that includes bacon may satisfy your taste buds, but it may also be hurting your health. Regularly eating bacon and other processed meats raises your chances of getting cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer and type 2 diabetes, according to a recent study. Besides bacon, popular processed meats include sausages, hot dogs and deli meats like salami and pastrami.

The University of Edinburgh, Scotland study specifically showed that reducing the consumption of processed meat products by a third could prevent more than 350,000 cases of type 2 diabetes in the U.S. over ten years. Cutting out about 10 slices of bacon a week could lead to substantially fewer cases of heart disease and colon cancer.

It's not only processed meat that's unhealthy. Unprocessed meat can also negatively impact our health. The same study showed that eating less meat also helps reduce the incidence of disease.

Reducing the amount of meat we eat would not only help our health to improve but could positively impact our environment.

For example, just by cutting your intake of unprocessed red meat by 30 percent could lower the incidence of diabetes by one-third over the next ten years. What does 30 percent less meat in your diet look like? Eating one fewer quarter-pound beef burger a week.

To come to these projections, the researchers constructed a “microsimulation” using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Health Interview Survey to create a representative sample of the U.S. adult population.

Reducing the amount of meat we eat would not only help our health to improve but could positively impact our environment. “Cutting consumption of meat has been recommended by national and international organizations to reduce greenhouse gas emission, including the Climate Change Committee here in the UK and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC,” one of the authors of the study, Professor Lindsay Jaacks, the Personal Chair of Global Health and Nutrition at the University of Edinburgh, said in a press release.

“Our research finds that these changes in diets could also have significant health benefits in the U.S., and so this is a clear win-win for people and planet”, he added.

If you're thinking of putting less meat in your menu, the Environmental Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, suggests starting slowly by trying Meatless Mondays. The idea is that beginning the week by not eating meat will encourage people during the rest of the week to opt for more plant-based foods.

What are some protein-packed, plant-based substitutes? Try:

You don't have to give up bacon completely. Simply cutting back on it a little will help your health and that of the planet.

The study is published in The Lancet Planetary Health.