An international team of scientists has developed a diet they say can improve health and ensure sustainable food production to further reduce damage to the planet.
The “planetary health diet” is based on cutting red meat and sugar in half and increasing your intake of fruits, vegetables and nuts.
The study report, published in the scientific journal The Lancet, shows that the regimen can prevent up to 11.6 million premature deaths without harming the planet.
The authors warn that a global shift in diet and food production is needed, as 3 billion people worldwide are undernourished — which includes those who are under and over-nourished — while food production is exceeding environmental targets. , causing climate change, loss of biodiversity and pollution.
The world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, and the growth, coupled with our current diet and food production habits, “will exacerbate the risks to people and the planet,” the authors say.
“The risks are very high,” says Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, on the report’s findings, noting that one billion people live with hunger and another two billion eat too much of the wrong foods.
Horton believes that “nutrition has not yet managed to get the kind of political attention that is given to diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.”
“Using the best available evidence” from controlled feeding studies, randomized trials and large cut-off studies, the authors came up with a new recommendation, explained Dr. Walter Willett, lead author of the paper and professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.
The report suggests five strategies to ensure that people can change their diets and not harm the planet in doing so: encouraging people to eat healthier, shifting global production to varied cultures, intensifying agriculture sustainably, stricter policies on oceans and lands and reduce food waste.
The “Planetary Health Diet”
To enable a healthy global population, the team of scientists created a global reference diet, which they call the “Planetary Health Diet”, which is an ideal daily eating plan for people over two years old, which they believe will help to reduce chronic diseases such as coronary heart disease, stroke and diabetes, as well as environmental degradation.
The diet breaks down the ideal daily intake of whole grains, starchy vegetables, fruits, dairy products, proteins, fats and sugars, representing a total daily intake of 2,500 calories.
They recognize the difficulty of the task, which will require “substantial” dietary changes at a global level, requiring consumption of foods such as red meat and sugar to decrease by more than 50%. In turn, consumption of nuts, fruits, vegetables and legumes is expected to increase more than twice, says the report.
The diet advises people to consume 2,500 calories a day, which is a little more than people are eating today, Willett said. People should eat a “variety of plant-based foods, low amounts of animal foods, unsaturated rather than saturated fats, and few refined grains, highly processed foods and added sugars,” he said.
Regional differences are also important. For example, North American countries eat almost 6.5 times the recommended amount of red meat, while South Asian countries eat 1.5 times the required amount of starchy vegetables.
“Almost all regions of the world are substantially exceeding” recommended levels of red meat, the Harvard professor said.
The health and environmental benefits of dietary changes like these are known, “but until now, the challenge of getting healthy diets from a sustainable food system has been hampered by a lack of science-based guidelines.” rated Howard Frumkin, head of the UK’s biomedical department.
“The research provides governments, producers and individuals with an evidence-based starting point for working together to transform our food systems and cultures,” he said.
If the new diet were adopted globally, 10.9 to 11.6 million premature deaths could be avoided every year — which equates to 19% to 23.6% of adult deaths. Reducing sodium and increasing whole grains, nuts, vegetables and fruits contributed the most to preventing deaths, according to one of the models in the report.
making it happen
Some scientists are skeptical of the possibility of shifting the global population to this diet.
The recommended diet “is a shock” in terms of how feasible it is and how it should be implemented, said Alan Dangour, professor of food and nutrition for global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
What “immediately makes implementation quite difficult” is the fact that intergovernmental departments have to work together, he said. Dangour was not involved in the production of the report.
At the current level of food production, the “planetary health diet” is not achievable, said Modi Mwatsama, senior scientific leader for food systems, nutrition and health at the Wellcome Trust Institute.
Some countries are not able to grow enough food because they may, for example, lack resistant crops, while in other countries unhealthy foods are heavily promoted, she said.
Mwatsama added that unless there are structural changes, such as subsidies moving away from meat production and environmental changes, as well as limits on how much fertilizer can be used, “we won’t see people reaching that goal.”
To enable populations to follow the reference diet, the report suggests five strategies, of which subsidies are an option.
These fall under a recommendation to ensure good policy on land and ocean systems, for example by banning deforestation and removing subsidies to world fisheries as they lead to overcapacity of the global fishing fleet.
Second, the report further outlines strategies such as encouraging farmers to shift food production from large amounts of a few crops to diversified production of nutritious crops.
Healthy eating should also be made more accessible, and low-income groups should be helped with social protections to prevent continued inadequate nutrition, the authors suggest, and people should be encouraged to eat healthy through information campaigns.
A fourth strategy suggests that when agriculture is intensified, consideration should be given to local conditions to ensure best agricultural practices for a region, thus producing the best crops.
Finally, the team suggests reducing food waste by improving harvest planning and market access in low- and middle-income countries, while improving consumer shopping habits in high-income countries.
Louise Manning, a professor of agri-food resilience and supply chain at the Royal Agricultural University, said meeting the goal of reducing food waste is a “very difficult thing to achieve” because it would require government, communities and individual families to come together.
However, “it can be done,” said Manning, who was not involved in the report, noting the reversal of plastic use in countries like the UK.
The health of the planet
The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement aimed to limit global warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Achieving this goal is no longer just about decarbonizing energy systems by reducing fossil fuels, but also about a food transition, said Johan Rockström, professor of environmental science at the Center for Resilience and Sustainability at Stockholm University in Sweden, who co-led the study.
“This is urgent,” he said. Without global adaptation of the reference diet, the world “will not succeed with the Paris Climate Agreement”.
A sustainable food production system requires that emissions of non-greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide be limited, but methane is produced during the digestion of livestock, while nitrous oxides are released from agricultural land and pastures.
However, the authors believe these emissions are unavoidable to provide healthy food for 10 billion people. They highlight that the decarbonization of the world’s energy system must progress faster than anticipated to accommodate this.
Overall, ensuring a healthy population and planet requires a combination of all strategies, the report concludes — major dietary changes, improved food production and technological changes, as well as reduced food waste.
“Designing and operationalizing sustainable food systems that can provide healthy diets to a growing and wealthier world population presents a formidable challenge. Nothing short of a new global agricultural revolution,” said Rockström, adding that “solutions exist.”
“It’s about behavioral change. It’s about technologies. It’s about politics. These are regulations. But we know how to do that” concludes the scientist.
Source: CNN Brasil
