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An international team of scientists has developed a diet that, he says, can improve health while ensuring sustainable food production to reduce damage to the planet.
The "global health plan" is to halve the consumption of red meat and sugar and increase the consumption of fruits, vegetables and nuts.
And it can prevent up to 11.6 million premature deaths without harming the planet, says the report released Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet.
The authors warn that a global change in diet and food production is needed as 3 billion people worldwide suffer from malnutrition – which includes undernourished and overfed – and that food production overshoots environmental goals, resulting in climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, Cnet reported.
The world's population is expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050; this growth, along with our current food and food production habits, will "exacerbate the risks to people and the planet," according to the authors.
"The stakes are very important," said Dr. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, about the report's findings, noting that one billion people were living in hunger and that two billion were eating too much amount of bad food.
Horton believes that "nutrition has still failed to attract the political attention given to diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria".
"Using the best available evidence" from controlled diet studies, randomized trials and large cohort studies, the authors have formulated a new recommendation, explained Dr. Walter Willett , lead author of the article and professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
The report suggests five strategies to ensure that people can change their diets without harming the planet: encourage people to eat healthier, direct global production to various crops, intensify agriculture so sustainable development, introduce stricter rules for oceans and land management, and reduce food waste.
The planetary diet
To enable a healthy global population, the team of scientists has created a global reference diet, called a "global diet," which is an ideal daily meal plan for people over 2 years old, which, in their opinion, will help reduce chronic diseases. such as coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, as well as the degradation of the environment.
The diet divides the optimal daily intake into whole grains, starchy vegetables, fruits, dairy products, proteins, fats and sugars, representing a total caloric intake of 2,500 calories per day.
They recognize the difficulty of the task, which will require "substantial" changes in global nutrition, requiring a reduction of more than 50% in the consumption of foods such as red meat and sugar. In turn, the consumption of nuts, fruits, vegetables and legumes must be multiplied by more than two, says the report.
The diet recommends people consume 2,500 calories a day, which is slightly more than what people eat today, Willett said. People should eat "a variety of plant-based foods, small amounts of animal feed, unsaturated rather than saturated fats, and little refined grains, highly processed foods, and added sugars," he said. -he declares.
Regional differences are also important to note. For example, North American countries consume nearly 6.5 times the amount of red meat recommended, while Southeast Asian countries consume 1.5 times the required amount of starchy vegetables.
"Almost every region of the world is outperforming the recommended levels of red meat," Willett said.
The health and environmental benefits of such dietary changes are known, "but until now, the lack of science-based recommendations precluded reaching healthy diets from a healthy diet. sustainable food system, "said Howard Frumkin, director of the biomedical sector in the UK. charitable research Our Wellcome Trust's Our Planet, Our Health program funded the research.
"It provides governments, producers and individuals with an evidence-based starting point for working together to transform our food systems and crops," he said.
If the new diet were adopted globally, 10.9 to 11.6 million premature deaths could be prevented each year, which equates to 19% to 23.6% of deaths among adults. According to one of the report's models, a reduction in sodium and an increase in whole grains, nuts, vegetables and fruits have contributed the most to the prevention of deaths.
Make it happen
Some scientists are skeptical about the possibility of transferring the world's population to this diet.
The recommended diet is "shocking" as to its feasibility and implementation, said Alan Dangour, professor of nutrition and nutrition for global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. What "makes immediate implementation difficult enough" is the fact that intergovernmental departments have to work together, he said. Dangour was not involved in the report.
At the current level of food production, the benchmark regime is not feasible, said Modi Mwatsama, chief scientific officer (food systems, nutrition and health) at the Wellcome Trust. Some countries are not able to produce enough food because they could, for example, lack resilient crops, while in other countries, unhealthy foods are strongly encouraged, she said.
Mwatsama added that unless structural changes, such as subsidies that move away from meat production, and environmental changes, such as limiting the amount of fertilizer that can be used, "we will not see people achieve this goal. "
To enable people to follow the reference regime, the report proposes five strategies, of which subsidies are an option. These are part of a recommendation to ensure good governance of land and ocean systems, for example by banning land clearing and removing subsidies to global fisheries, as they result in overcapacity of the global fishing fleet. .
Secondly, the report also describes strategies such as encouraging farmers to shift their food production from large quantities of a small number of crops to a diversified production of nutritious crops.
The authors suggest that healthy foods should also be made more accessible, for example low-income groups should benefit from social protection in order to avoid inadequate nutrition, and encourage people to eat healthfully through information campaigns.
A fourth strategy suggests that when agriculture is intensified, it must take into account local conditions to ensure best agricultural practices for a region, producing the best harvests.
Finally, the team suggests reducing food waste by improving crop planning and market access in low- and middle-income countries, while improving consumer buying habits in countries. high income.
Louise Manning, professor of agri-food and supply chain resilience at Royal Agricultural University, said that it was "very difficult to achieve the goal of reducing waste." as the government, communities and individual households should unite.
However, "this can be done," said Manning, who was not involved in the report, noting the decline in the use of plastic in countries such as the United Kingdom.
The health of the planet
The 2015 Paris climate agreement aimed to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius more than pre-industrial levels. Achieving this goal will not only mean reducing carbon emissions in energy systems by reducing fossil fuels, but also making the transition between foods, said Johan Rockström, professor of environmental science at Stockholm. Resilience Center of Stockholm University in Sweden, which co-directed study.
"It's urgent," he said. Without a global adaptation of the reference regime, the world "will not succeed with the Paris Agreement on Climate".
A sustainable food production system requires that greenhouse gas emissions such as methane and nitrous oxide be limited, but methane is produced during the digestion of livestock while nitrogen oxides are released cultivated lands and pastures. But the authors believe that these emissions are inevitable to provide healthy food to 10 billion people. They stress that the decarbonization of the global energy system must progress faster than expected to achieve this.
Overall, ensuring the health of people and the planet requires the combination of all strategies – major changes in food, improved food production and technology, reduced food waste.
"Designing and implementing sustainable food systems that can provide healthy diets to a growing and richer global population is a major challenge – nothing less than a new global agricultural revolution," Rockström said. , adding that "the solutions exist.
"It's a change in behavior, it's about technology, it's about politics, it's about regulations, but we know how to do it."
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