The EAT–Lancet Commission: Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems – Summary Notes
Key Messages of The EAT–Lancet Commission
Centrality of Food Systems: Food systems are at the intersection of health, environment, climate, and justice. Transforming them is critical to solving crises in these areas. Changes in food systems act as a global integrator across economic, governance, and policy domains.
Updated Planetary Health Diet (PHD):
Composition: Emphasizes appropriate energy intake, diverse whole or minimally processed plant-based foods, primarily unsaturated fats (no partially hydrogenated oils), and minimal added sugars and salt.
Flexibility: Compatible with various cultures, dietary patterns, traditions, and individual preferences.
Health Outcomes: Provides nutritional adequacy and reduces risks of non-communicable diseases. A global shift to the PHD could prevent approximately 15 million deaths per year (27\% of total deaths worldwide) and promote healthy longevity.
Planetary Boundary Transgressions: Food systems drive five planetary boundary transgressions:
Land system change
Biosphere integrity
Freshwater change
Biogeochemical flows
Approximately 30\% of greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change.
Transformation of global food systems is essential to address climate and biodiversity crises. Without it, global warming will exceed the Paris Agreement's limit of 1.5^ ext{o}\text{C}, even with a global energy shift away from fossil fuels.
Human Rights and Justice Deficits:
Nearly half of the world's population does not meet human rights related to food systems (e.g., rights to food, a healthy environment, and decent work).
The wealthiest 30\% of the global population are responsible for over 70\% of environmental pressures from food systems.
Only 1\% of the global population resides in a safe and just space, highlighting vast inequalities in the distribution of food system benefits and burdens.
National policies addressing these inequities are crucial for meeting food-related human rights.
PHD Availability and Demand: The PHD must be available, affordable, convenient, aspirational, appealing, and delicious. Interventions such as promoting healthy food environments, next-generation culinary R&D, increasing purchasing power, and protecting traditional diets are vital.
Multifaceted Transformation: No single action is sufficient. A transformation following EAT–Lancet recommendations (healthy diets, improved agricultural productivity, reduced food loss and waste) would significantly reduce environmental pressures.
Shifting to healthy diets alone could reduce agricultural emissions by 15\%. Combining this with productivity improvements and reduced food loss/waste could achieve a 20\% reduction.
Combined actions substantially reduce future growth in nitrogen and phosphorus use (a 15\% increase compared to 2020 levels versus a 41\% increase under business-as-usual).
Environmental Benefits of Sustainable Practices: Unprecedented investment in sustainable and ecological intensification practices (SEI) could lead to a net-zero food system. These practices can sequester carbon, create habitats, reduce nutrient pollution, and improve water quality.
Enabled by equitable land/water access, strong public advisory services, addressing agribusiness imbalances, and public/private investments.
Socioeconomic Implications: Transformation could lead to a less resource-intensive and labor-intensive food system capable of feeding 9.6 billion people by 2050 with modest impacts on average food costs.
Requires significant restructuring: e.g., 33\% reduction in ruminant meat production and 63\% increase in fruit, vegetable, and nut production compared to 2020 levels.
Justice as a Catalyst: Justice is essential to unlock and accelerate change. A fair distribution of resources and responsibilities ensures human rights are met and food systems operate within planetary boundaries. Addressing power asymmetries and discriminatory structures is key.
Urgent and Aligned Action: Requires unprecedented action, building coalitions, developing national/regional roadmaps, unlocking finance, and aligning with existing frameworks (Paris Agreement, Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, SDGs).
Introduction: Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems
Outsized Impact of Food Systems: Food systems profoundly affect human well-being and planetary health, influencing lifespan, quality of life, planetary boundaries, and governance.
Shifting Global Context Since 2019 EAT–Lancet Commission:
Increased geopolitical instability.
Soaring food prices.
COVID--19 pandemic exacerbating existing vulnerabilities and creating new challenges.
Despite these, food systems remain central to food security, human health, environmental sustainability, social justice, and national resilience.
Current State of Food Systems:
Have largely kept pace with population growth regarding caloric intake.
Single most influential driver of planetary boundary transgression.
Over half the world's population lacks access to healthy diets, leading to public health, social equity, and environmental consequences.
Hunger, after some decline, is rising again due to conflicts and climate change.
Obesity rates are increasing globally.
Pressure on planetary boundaries shows no abatement.
Opportunity for Resilience: Food systems offer a unique opportunity to build resilience in environmental, health, economic, and social systems, enhancing human well-being and Earth-system stability.
Update to the 2019 Commission:
Expanded Scope: Adds analysis of social foundations for a just food system.
New Data: Incorporates perspectives on distributive, representational, and recognitional justice to provide a global overview of equity.
Improved Modeling: Uses a multimodel ensemble to project outcomes of a transition to healthy and sustainable food systems.
Cornerstone: Planetary Health Diet (PHD):
Framework: Provides a framework for diverse and culturally appropriate diets.
Evidence: Updated robust evidence supports strong associations with improved health outcomes, significant reductions in all-cause mortality, and a decline in major diet-related chronic diseases.
Emphasis: Predominantly plant-based, with moderate animal-sourced foods and minimal added sugars, saturated fats, and salt.
Implementation: Requires cultural consideration and promotion of appropriate, sustainable dietary traditions.
Flexibility: Offers substantial flexibility across cultures, geographies, and preferences within reference values.
Urgency: Transformation demands urgent changes in individual/collective behaviors and unsustainable production/consumption cultures to address climate, biodiversity, health, and justice crises.
Quantifying Planetary Boundary Impacts:
First-time quantification of global food systems' share of all nine planetary boundaries.
Food is the single largest cause of planetary boundary transgressions, driving five of the six breached boundaries.
Significant impact on the already transgressed climate boundary and ocean acidification boundary.
Land Conversion: Unsustainable land conversion (especially deforestation) is a major driver of biodiversity loss and climate change, necessitating zero conversion of intact ecosystems.
Biogeochemical Flows: Food systems account for nearly all nitrogen and phosphorus boundary transgressions, highlighting the need for improved nutrient management, efficient redistribution, and circular nutrient systems.
Novel Entities: Massive and alarmingly understudied use of novel entities (plastics, pesticides) in food production, processing, and packaging remains a major concern.
Justice Assessment: Integrates three dimensions: distributive, representational, and recognitional, within a human rights framework (rights to food, a healthy environment, and decent work).
Reveals significant inequities in access to healthy diets, decent work, and healthy environments, disproportionately affecting marginalized groups in low-income regions.
Proposes nine social foundations to enable these rights, with global status assessable for six.
Priorities: Ensuring access, affordability, and demand for healthy diets.
Environmental Rights: Right to live/work in a non-toxic environment and stable climate system, recognizing environmental degradation's profound impact on human health.
Worker Rights: Living wage and meaningful representation for active participation in building just food systems.
Scale of Injustice: Nearly half of the world's population falls below these social foundations, undermining basic human rights.
Overconsumption: Diets of 6.9 billion people threaten further planetary boundary transgression, emphasizing healthy diets as a human right and a shared responsibility.
Multimodel Ensemble Scenario Results:
11 global food system models project substantial potential for reducing negative environmental and health effects through dietary shifts, increased agricultural productivity, and reduced food loss/waste.
Adoption of PHD coupled with ambitious climate mitigation policies would lead to significant reductions in GHG emissions and land use.
Sobering Reality: Even with ambitious transformations, returning to a safe space for freshwater use and climate change is barely achieved, and biogeochemical boundaries for nitrogen/phosphorus loading remain transgressed (though with reduced pressure).
Sustainable and Ecological Intensification (SEI):
Analyses show worldwide adoption of SEI and more circular nutrient systems could reduce GHG emissions, increase carbon sequestration, decrease land/water footprints, and significantly address nitrogen/phosphorus boundary transgressions, even with population/consumption growth.
Eight Priority Solutions for 2050 (Healthy, Sustainable, Just Food Systems):
Create food environments to increase demand for healthy, accessible, and affordable diets.
Protect and promote healthy traditional diets.
Implement sustainable and ecological intensification practices.
Apply strong regulations to prevent loss of intact ecosystems.
Improve infrastructure, management, and consumer behavior to reduce food loss and waste.
Secure decent working conditions.
Ensure meaningful representation for all.
Recognize and protect marginalized groups.
These solutions require coherent bundles for political feasibility and policy effectiveness, tailored to specific contexts.
Urgent Great Food Transformation: Requires concerted global action and unprecedented transformative change. Calls for cross-sectoral coalitions developing context-specific roadmaps, aligned with Paris Agreement, Convention on Biological Diversity, and post-2030 SDGs.
Roadmaps must include science-based targets with monitoring and accountability.
Mechanisms needed to shield policymaking from corporate influence, with civil society promoting transparency.
Financial Resources: US\$200 billion to US\$500 billion per year needed for transformation. Cost of action is far lower than inaction; investments could yield US\$5 trillion per year in economic benefits.
Repurposing existing investments by realigning incentives (e.g., supporting sustainable practices, underconsumed foods) and eliminating support for polluting/unhealthy practices.
Justice as Prerequisite: Justice is a goal and driving force. Food systems cannot be just without affordable/accessible PHD and reduced planetary boundary transgressions. It's necessary to overcome structural barriers.
Glossary
Planetary health diet (PHD):
A dietary pattern promoting optimal health globally, adaptable to cultural/regional variations.
Rich in plants (whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes), with moderate/small amounts of fish, dairy, and meat.
Defined by direct health effects, with evidence suggesting adoption would also reduce environmental impacts and nutritional deficiencies of current diets.
Food system boundaries:
Science-based targets representing the food system's allocation of safe operating space within planetary boundaries.
Based on estimated contribution needed from food systems to return or stay within planetary boundaries.
Considers current food system contributions to transgressions, minimum unavoidable environmental impacts, and impact reduction while maintaining productive agriculture.
Sustainable and ecological intensification:
Sustainable intensification: Reducing environmental impacts of food systems through increased efficiency, reduced losses, and pollution.
Ecological intensification: A subset enhancing environmental performance via ecological processes in agriculture (e.g., carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, pollination, pest regulation).
Social foundations:
Conditions enabling universal basic human rights (food, healthy environment, decent work).
Builds on defining minimum resources to avoid deprivations, focusing on conditions for human rights (e.g., healthy/affordable diets, safe climate, non-toxic environment, living wages, meaningful representation).
Great food transformation:
An unprecedented global commitment across all sectors to make healthy food accessible to all, produced, processed, distributed, and consumed justly within planetary boundaries.
Critical Scientific Assessment
Encouraging Trends: Growing attention to food systems in science and practice.
Stronger evidence for food's importance for human health and planetary stability.
Increasing recognition of food justice as integral to successful food systems transformations.
Over 12,000 citations of the 2019 EAT–Lancet Commission, generating new research on PHD indices, national dietary impact assessments, economic analyses, novel technologies, and behavior change.
Most evidence supports 2019 findings, adding new insights and stronger support for policy and public awareness.
Needed Areas of Attention: Evidence highlights the need for additional focus on:
Socioeconomic drivers and lock-ins inhibiting change.
Impacts of food across all nine planetary boundaries (beyond just climate).
Global Commitments and Initiatives:
2021 UN Food Systems Summit led two-thirds of countries to adopt national food systems transformation pathways and integrate food into their Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement.
Over 290 cities (totaling 490 million people) signed the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, implementing >620 food system actions.
IPCC and IPBES assessed food systems, noting dependency and impact on biodiversity, climate, water, and health.
Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022) set specific food system targets, recognizing food's central role in human health, social justice, and environmental sustainability.
Alarms Raised: Deep concern over efforts to undermine, hide, or obfuscate climate science, environmental protections, and justice, which aggravates challenges.
Critique of Current Pathways: Most emerging national food system pathways are:
Poorly articulated with non-specific targets.
Lack accountability and ambition.
Include too few and siloed interventions.
Lack appropriate financial support.
Slow action is unjust and dangerous for current and future generations.
Objectives of this Commission (Update):
Diet and Health: Review evidence since 2019 on PHD, dietary patterns, health outcomes (including dementia, atrial fibrillation, food processing effects, implications for children/women of reproductive age), and cultural diversity. Provide updated health impacts by country/sociodemographic group.
Food Production and Earth System: Review evidence on food production's effect on Earth system. Assess global food system against all nine planetary boundaries (updated from five in 2019). Propose specific food system boundaries for target setting. Assess how SEI practices can support transformation.
Justice in Food Systems: Establish social foundations for a just food system and assess current systems against them. Focus on human rights to food, a healthy environment, and decent work, assessing global injustice distribution and consumption pressures.
Multimodel Analysis: Quantify consequences of food systems transformation (healthy diets, sustainable production by 2050) using ten agroeconomic/environmental models, considering socioeconomic impacts.
Solutions and Actions: Propose solutions and actions to ensure access to and demand for healthy, sustainable, and just food systems, emphasizing delicious and desirable foods. Discuss roadmaps for urgent systemic transformation.
Biophysical Possibility: Despite daunting challenges, achieving access to healthy, fairly produced/consumed food within planetary boundaries remains biophysically possible.
Synergies between economic, social, environmental interventions and outcomes are often overlooked and should be leveraged.
Healthy diets are a fundamental right and shared responsibility.
Requires major efforts to manage transformation, addressing lock-ins (e.g., power imbalances, weak incentives for prevention vs. treatment) and political economies.
Provides clear quantitative guidance on health, sustainability, and justice.
Treatment of Uncertainty
Acknowledging Uncertainty: Recognizes that decisions on dietary health, environmental sustainability, and social justice have inherent uncertainty due to incomplete, imperfect, and evolving evidence.
Reducing Uncertainty: This Commission reviews knowledge evolution over the past five years to reduce uncertainty.
Best Available Science: Estimates are based on the best available science, with acknowledged uncertainties.
Confidence Levels: Improved through systematic reviews and broader community efforts to validate findings.
Multimodel Intercomparison: A new contribution involving ten global food system modeling teams tested the impact of PHD adoption and sustainable production on feeding humanity within planetary boundaries (Section 4).
High Scientific Confidence: High confidence in the overall direction and magnitude of required food systems transformation, though detailed quantifications have considerable uncertainty.
Modeling Limitations: Models provide best estimates of implications for human and planetary health but do not dictate specific transition pathways, which depend on individual societies.
Scope Limitation: Does not provide historical analysis but evaluates a broad range of solutions. Encourages urgent evaluation and adoption of context-specific solutions.
Flexibility: PHD and food system boundaries offer healthy and sustainable conditions within which many dietary compositions and practices fit. Specific actions are beyond the Commission's scope but emphasize scientist-policymaker-practitioner interaction.
Section 1: What is a Healthy Diet?
Review Scope: Reviews evidence on diet and health, presenting reference values for food group intakes in the reference PHD (Table 1).
Updates Since 2019 Commission:
Included additional health outcomes: dementia and atrial fibrillation.
Considered effects of food processing.
Examined implications of PHD for young children and women of reproductive age.
Summarizes epidemiological studies on PHD's relation to mortality and other health outcomes.
Describes gaps between current dietary intakes and PHD globally and regionally.
Discusses alignment of different dietary cultures with PHD.
Approach to Defining Healthy Diets
Core Principles: Healthy diets should be adequate, diverse, balanced, and moderate.
Variability in Nutritional Requirements: Needs vary by age, sex, body size, physical activity, pregnancy/lactation, health status, and genetics.
Common Biology: Effects of diets are similar across ancestry/ethnic groups due to common human biology.
Target Population: Focuses on generally healthy people aged \ge 2 years, but PHD also addresses health risks in undernourished populations.
Food-Based Definition: Defines healthy diets as combinations of foods to directly link health with food production and consumption.
Nutrient Adequacy: Included in analysis, but primary focus is on specific health outcomes related to insufficient or excessive food intakes, not just numerical targets for essential nutrients.
Nutrient requirements are often based on small, short-term studies, lacking sufficient evidence for long-term overall health.
Components of PHD: Includes food groups, added fats, sugar, and salt as substantial components of most diets.
Assumption: Most foods are consumed whole, unprocessed, or minimally processed.
Indirect Effects (Panel 2): Discusses potential indirect effects mediated by environmental impacts, such as antimicrobial resistance and pandemic risk. (Controlling contaminants not comprehensively reviewed here).
Factors Not Defining Health: Cost, affordability, and environmental impacts of production are important but do not define a diet's healthiness (addressed in other sections).
Review of Evidence on Diet and Health
Goal: Provide evidence and quantitative description of a healthy dietary pattern applicable globally, supporting cultural/regional variation.
Causality Assessment (Panel 3): Considered prospective epidemiological studies, randomized trials with intermediate risk factors, and available trials with health endpoints.
Challenges: Large, long-term randomized trials with disease/functional endpoints are often unfeasible/unethical.
Frameworks: Used Bradford Hill criteria to assess causality for dietary factors in combination with observational studies and trials with intermediate risk factors.
Isocaloric Substitution: Analyses comparing specific dietary components (e.g., red meat vs. legumes/nuts/fish) are informative as they represent realistic choices within constrained total energy intake.
Consistency: Evaluates PHD as an overall dietary pattern in relation to mortality and other health outcomes.
PHD Reference Values (Table 1):
Developed as a foundation for optimal health outcomes and to evaluate global environmental impacts.
Not exact individual targets, but approximate ranges and proportions configurable for different energy intakes and preferences.
Updated review in Appendix 1 (pp 2–23).
Dietary Energy Requirements: Estimated average global energy intake for adults is 2400 kcal/day (down from 2500 in 2019) based on new doubly labeled water method, assuming ideal BMI of 22 kg/m^2 and