Healthy and sustainable

What could the diet of the future look like?

In 2050, almost 10 billion people will be living on this planet. How can we then feed ourselves so that everyone is healthy, and the ecosystems are not overloaded? A working group of international scientists (the EAT-Lancet Commission) has ventured a global answer to this question and presented a ‘Planetary Health Diet’. According to this report, we need to consume significantly fewer animal products, more plant-based protein and whole grains, much more fruits, vegetables and nuts. And ideally all of this should be less processed, locally produced, organically grown (or at least without artificial fertilisers and toxins) and with significantly less waste.

Of course, this ‘magic formula’ does not always look the same in different regions of the world or socioeconomic classes. However, the basic ground rules of healthy, sustainable and wholesome nutrition tend to be similar across the world. Eating ‘healthy’ and ‘enough’ can have a radically different meaning for different people: for many of us this means eating significantly less (and better quality) than we do currently, while for millions of people, this means eating much more than they do now to meet their needs.

These findings are not entirely new to most of us. We just need to do what we have known for a long time and not allow ourselves and our children to be seduced by a billion-dollar advertising industry into a constant excess of sugar, fat, meat and empty calories in artificial products. Things that are healthy for us usually leave the environment better off too.