COMMENT: It's been a cracking start to the year for medical journal The Lancet, with the release of a large NZ-led study on fibre (discussed last week), and another doorstop of a report: Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems.
It's a snooze-inducing title, but the report itself is a fascinating and important piece of work. It's the first time an attempt has been made to come up with a diet for the world that not only keeps people healthy, but also allows for nothing less than the survival of the planet. It's the work of 37 experts from 16 countries. The way we've been eating and producing food for the past 50 years is no longer sustainable they say, nor is it giving us the nutrition we need, with obesity and malnutrition existing alongside widespread environmental degradation.
"We can no longer feed our population a healthy diet while balancing planetary resources," writes Lancet editor Tamara Lucas. "For the first time in 200,000 years of human history, we are severely out of synchronisation with the planet and nature."
This crisis, she says, is "stretching earth to its limits and threatening human and other species' sustained existence". Yikes.
The report presents a "planetary health" diet, which lets us feed 10 billion people by 2050 with a healthy and sustainable diet. This involves, they say, globally reducing our intakes of meat and sugar by 50 per cent, and doubling our intake of vegetables, legumes and nuts.