Diet for a healthy body and a healthy planet

As I have discussed elsewhere in this blog, the new Canada Food Guide has recently come out strongly in favour of replacing meat and dairy with healthier plant-based alternatives. But even before that Guide was published, an independent study commissioned by EAT-Lancet called Food in the Anthropocene came to the conclusion that a diet with less meat (particularly less red meat, and even more particularly less beef) is better both for our personal health and for the health.of the planet.

The report, by some of the top names in nutrition science, recommended less than half an ounce of red meat a day (the equivalent of a regular portion about once a week), five or six times less than what the average North American currently consumes. Because red meat, and beef in particular, requires so much land, water and feed, and because livestock contributes so much of our greenhouse gases,  cutting back on, or preferably cutting out, this source of protein from our diets, and reducing our intake of poultry and dairy products, would go a surprisingly long way towards achieving the kind of GHG emission cuts we need to be making to deal with climate change.

The report also concludes that such a diet would also be much healthier for us as individuals, although the meat industry and lobby has been vociferous in its condemnation of the report, as have some prominent promoters of trendy diets like the keto and paleo diets, and the Animal Agriculture Alliance has quickly issued its own detailed rebuttal. The EAT-Lancet reports does no more, though, than confirm what the majority of nutritionists and food scientists have been telling us for decades: follow a diet low in meat and high in fruits, vegetables and wholegrains, and eat as little processed and sugary food as possible. As Michael Pollan famously expressed it: "Eat food, not too much, mainly plants". As a vegetarian of 35 years, it makes me feel pretty smug.