WASHINGTON – Cutting global warming pollution would not only make the planet healthier, it would make people healthier too, newly released studies say.

Slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, the studies show. They were published in a special issue of The Lancet British medical journal, released Wednesday.

The calculations of lives saved were based on computer models that looked at pollution-caused illnesses in certain cities. The figures are also based on the world making dramatic changes in daily life that may at first seem too hard and costly to do, researchers conceded.

Cutting carbon dioxide emissions would also reduce other types of air pollution, especially tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause direct health damage, doctors said. Other benefits could come from encouraging more exercise and less meat consumption, to improve heart health, researchers said.

\"Reducing greenhouse gases not only helps save the planet in the long term, but it\'s going to improve our health virtually immediately,\" said Christopher Portier, associate director of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. That agency helped fund the studies along with the Wellcome Trust and several other international public health groups.

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