Diets for a Better Future

Diets for a Better Future demonstrates the leading role G20 countries can and must take to realize the exponential changes required for a healthy and sustainable world. The report explores what a more equitable distribution across a global ‘carbon budget’ for food could look like.
This report by EAT investigates current food consumption patterns and the efficacy of national dietary guidelines in G20 countries compared to the Planetary Health Diet.

Through it, G20 countries are presented with clear opportunities to lead reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and realize the health and related economic benefits of shifting toward more healthy and sustainable diets.

Most food consumption patterns in G20 countries are not aligned with those of a healthy flexitarian diet and most national dietary guidelines (NDGs) are not ambitious enough to bring food systems within planetary boundaries, including limiting global warming to 1.5°C. While countries like China and Indonesia have current consumption patterns aligned with the model necessary to protect health and the planet, maintaining the current patterns there and shifting in all other G20 countries is critical to protecting planet and people. This is important because NDGs are a necessary component of food policy and an essential first step to promoting healthy eating habits in a country often through educational programs or public awareness campaigns. If NDGs lack ambition or are incompatible with the latest science on human health and environmental sustainability, then this could influence national level food policy and individual food consumption.

The future of the food system will be central in shaping the future of our planet and our civilization.

First, let’s consider the environmental impacts of food. Most people don’t realize it, but our food system and agricultural practices are major drivers of environmental degradation worldwide. Already, agricultural land use dominates about 40% of the Earth’s land surface and has been the principle driver of tropical deforestation, habitat loss and degradation, and global biodiversity loss. Agriculture is also the biggest consumer, and polluter, of the world’s water resources. Lakes, aquifers, rivers, and even coastal oceans around the world have been disrupted by human activities, notably food production. And the food system contributes about 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, roughly comparable to the emissions resulting from the world’s production of electricity. In short, nothing else we do has come close to how food, agriculture, and land use are causing global environmental harm. Without major changes, our food system will continue to push Earth well beyond its planetary boundaries.

Beyond these environmental concerns, the world’s current food system also contributes to significant human failures. On the one hand, a sizable fraction of the world still faces crippling food insecurity and under-nutrition, while on the other hand, hundreds of millions of people face serious health challenges — including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease — linked to unhealthy diets.

To address these environmental and social challenges, we must reboot and reimagine our global food system. Numerous changes to the food system are needed, including protecting intact ecosystems, improving the sustainability of our farming practices, and addressing the tremendous levels of waste in the food system.

But there is one crucial factor that can simultaneously improve our health, our food security, and our environment at the same time – namely, changing our diets.

Our dietary choices, especially how much conventionally produced red meat and dairy products we consume, can drive health and environmental outcomes across the entire food system. Simply put, reducing the consumption of some foods, while increasing the consumption of others, could have tremendous benefits to the global environment and to human health.

This pioneering study by EAT examines how national dietary guidelines in G20 countries need to be shifted to improve human health and environmental outcomes in the food system. The results strongly indicate the need to change our views on diet and consider both the human health and environmental sustainability implications while setting national food policies. This study helps illustrate ways to build a better food system – promoting improved food security and human health while reducing environmental impacts.

In a world where climate change, biodiversity loss, food security, and diet-related illnesses are major concerns, changing diets may be one of the single most effective things we can do to build a better future. And this study is a powerful reminder of how we can do it.

This report builds upon a growing body of research pointing to the sweeping benefits of shifting diets. This research has shown that a global shift toward healthier, more sustainable diets will combat climate change and food insecurity (IPCC 2019), improve human health (GNR 2020, FAO et al. 2020) save nearly 11 million lives globally (Willett et al 2019), make national supply chains more resilient to shocks (FAO 2020), reduce the financial risks associated with meat production (FAIRR 2020), reduce the risks of future pandemics (WWF 2020; UNEP and ILRI 2020), and could unleash USD 4.5 trillion in new business opportunities each year, at the same time saving USD 5.7 trillion a year in damage to people and the planet (FOLU 2019).

• IPCC (2019). Climate Change and Land: an IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.
• Global Nutrition Report (2020). Action on equity to end malnutrition.
• FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO (2020). The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2020. Transforming food systems for affordable healthy diets.
• Willett W, Rockström J, Loken B, et al. (2019). Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems.
• FAO (2020). COVID-19 and the risk to food supply chains: How to respond?
• FAIRR (2020). An industry infected: Animal agriculture in a post-COVID world.
• WWF (2020). COVID19: Urgent Call to Protect People and Nature.
• United Nations Environment Programme and International Livestock Research Institute (2020). Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission.
• FOLU (2019). Growing Better: Ten Critical Transitions to Transform Food and Land Use.

For any media enquiries, please contact Susan Tonassi.
To contact the Lead Author of the report, please contact Brent Loken.