The EAT-Lancet Commission’s ‘Planetary Health Diet’ – the result of a three-year International project to set global dietary and food production targets – is dividing opinion in organic and nutrition communities.
The project’s findings and recommendations are brought together in a report published this month in The Lancet.
The new report draws on the work of 30 world-leading scientists in the first globally coordinated project to attempt to define both what constitutes a healthy diet, and a sustainable food system. Having tasked itself with answering the question ‘Can we feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries?’, the Commission’s new report sets our a series of priority actions and recommendations:
• Globally, cutting red meat and sugar consumption by half, while doubling vegetables, fruit, pulses and nuts in the diet
• Limiting each person to eat less that 50g a day of eggs, fish, sugar and meat – the equivalent of equivalent of a quarter of a rasher of bacon, a 16th of a burger
• Shifting food production to a comprehensively more sustainable footing – requiring decarbonisation of agriculture, net zero expansion of agricultural land and “drastic improvements” in fertiliser and water use.
The planetary health diet is largely plant-based and allows an average of 2,500 calories a day. Half of each plate of food under the diet is vegetables and fruit, and a third is wholegrain cereals. The scientists behind the report say that the diet is a “win-win”, as it would “save at least 11 million people a year from deaths caused by unhealthy food, while preventing the collapse of the natural world that humanity depends upon”.
Restoring balance
UK organic certifier the Soil Association has broadly welcomed the report, noting a summarising comment by Dr Richard Horton, editor in chief at the Lancet, that: “Our connection with nature holds the answer, and if we can eat in a way that works for our planet as well as our bodies, the natural balance of the planet’s resources will be restored.”
Commenting on the report, Joanna Lewis, policy director at the Soil Association said: “…This ground-breaking scientific report makes game changing recommendations defining the direction of travel towards a sustainable food and farming system to achieve healthy diets for all by 2050. This important report must be reflected immediately in (UK) Government policy, including amending the draft Agriculture Bill to make public health and agro-ecological farming specific objectives, and ensuring adequate support is available for farmers to make the necessary transition.”
“(the report is) an important correction to those who advocate a ‘business as usual’ brand of ‘sustainable intensification’”
The Soil Association calls the report an “important correction to those who advocate a ‘business as usual’ brand of ‘sustainable intensification’”. The organic charity also rejects criticism of the report from some quarters that it is ‘anti-meat’, pointing to its advocation of ‘livestock on leftovers’ – livestock systems in which animals are reared on grass or food waste that is inedible to humans.
One of the report’s authors, the food policy expert professor Tim Lang, said that while there were no “easy fixes” to the challenges facing the current food system, the goal was “within reach”. He said: “The specific targets we have devised for a healthy, sustainable diet are an important foundation which will underpin and drive this change.”
But the Sustainable Food Trust says that the new report’s recommendations “are at odds with sustainable food production” and betray a “fundamental lack of agricultural understanding”.
Confusing messages
Patrick Holden, chief executive of the SFT said, “We welcome the fact that the report highlights the urgent need for fundamental change in farming systems and diets. However, it does little to inform the public about the path to a sustainable future and in some key respects will make things worse. A key weakness in the report is the failure to fully differentiate between livestock that are part of the problem and those that are an essential component of sustainable agricultural systems. This results in messages that are likely to add to existing confusion around what constitutes a healthy and sustainable diet.
“A key weakness in the report is the failure to fully differentiate between livestock that are part of the problem and those that are an essential component of sustainable agricultural systems”
While supporting the report’s recommendations for increased consumption of vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes, SFT takes issue with the EAT-Lancet Commission’s view that protein requirements can largely be taken care of by plant-based sources and poultry. Holden adds: “Humans have evolved as red meat eaters and, providing this is part of a balanced diet, beef and lamb provide superior types of protein and fat to plant sources.”
Writing in the UK food industry weekly The Grocer, the investigative food journalist and Swallow This author lambasted the report as “a top-down attempt by a small, unrepresentative, dogmatic global elite to mould public agriculture policy”
She said that the report’s dietary recommendations were “impractical” and would lead “nutritional deficiencies in affluent countries and acute protein shortages in the poorer ones”. And she warned that the almost wholesale shift towards plant-based foods would be a threat to soil fertility “as sustainably reared, pastured livestock are shunned and plant food monoculture, predicated on fossil fuel-derived pesticides, is applauded.”
Photo: EAT Stockholm Food Forum 2018, Photo: Johan Lygrell