The planetary diet
The way we eat not only plays a crucial role in our state of health but also has a strong impact on the environment. In the near future, food production and consumption will be an essential factor in improving global health indicators and addressing major challenges such as climate change.
What kind of world will we leave to future generations? What role does food play in achieving a state of universal good health and ensuring the sustainability of our planet? These and other questions are, implicitly, at the origin of the work entitled Food in the Anthropocene, produced in 2019 (and updated in 2025) by the EAT-Lancet Commission, made up of 37 scientists from 16 countries leading in various disciplines, ranging from human health to environmental sciences.
Its conclusions are clear: food is an essential lever to improve, on a global scale, human health and ensure the sustainability of the Earth.
A system under pression
The unstoppable global population growth exerts an inevitable pressure on land and water resources, increased by forms of production based on exploitation. Our current model is not sustainable over time, as it entails an incessant increase in the effects of climate change, the loss of biodiversity and an inefficient and unequal distribution of food.
As explained in a conversation with the magazine Compartir Ujué Fresán, a leading researcher in sustainable diets at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), states “we produce enough to feed the entire world population, but millions of people still go hungry.
At the same time, we waste tonnes of products, and we have a food industry that thinks fundamentally in terms of profitability. The EAT-Lancet report proposes something very important: moving towards a model of diet that is healthy, sustainable and also economically fair and affordable”
Planetary diet as a proposal for the future
Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement is much more than a merely political goal. It is, in fact, the best way to prevent today’s children from inheriting a degraded planet in which a significant part of the population may suffer from disease and malnutrition. The aim is that around ten billion people, by 2050, will be able to feed themselves through what the committee of experts has called “the planetary diet”.
And what does this way of eating consist of? As explained by Dr. Walter Willett, professor at Harvard University and co-chair, together with Professor Johan Rockström, of the panel of experts that produced the EAT-Lancet report, this “will require substantial changes (…). Global consumption of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and legumes will have to double, and the consumption of foods such as red meat and sugar will have to be reduced by more than 50%. A diet rich in plant-based foods and with fewer foods of animal origin will confer good health and environmental benefits”.
Five strategies for the great food transformation
Ensuring that the proposed diet can be extended to millions of people worldwide means designing a major action plan. EAT-Lancet proposes five essential issues to achieve the desired results:
