12/30/2025
NUTRITION
2025 EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems:
“By adopting the planetary health diet, 15 million early deaths could be prevented annually, and greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture could be cut by more than half”.
🤔Many of the people I see in my office are often confused about what a healthy diet looks like. Social media exposes us to a lot of misinformation (and conflicting information!) from various (questionable? unreliable?) sources making it almost impossible to know what we should, or shouldn’t believe.
☹️This is extremely important because UNHEALTHY DIETS ARE THE NUMBER ONE CAUSE OF NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES WORLDWIDE, RESPONSIBLE FOR ONE IN FIVE DEATHS GLOBALLY.
🌎-What if dozens of leading scientists, nutritionists, and public health experts from six different continents worked together to come up with the best dietary pattern for optimal human health? 🌎-What if a shift to that diet could prevent 14 million deaths worldwide every year?
🌎-What if that diet was also found to benefit the environment-by reducing our carbon footprint, freshwater and land use, and promoting biodiversity?
🌎-What if adopting that diet could also help address the inequalities in global access to healthy food and clean water?
🍎🥦🌽🥕The EAT-Lancet Commission did just that. The result is the planetary health diet (or PDH). The PDH is clear in its recommendations: a diet that is built around plants. A plant predominant diet is one where our plates are full of colorful, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans, chickpeas, lentils, and soy, as well as nuts and seeds, herbs and spices. There is room for modest amounts of dairy, fish and meat. Red meat, processed meat and sugar are limited due to significant health risks.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
🍓-Minimum of 5 servings per day of fruits and vegetables
🥬-3 to 5 servings per day of legumes, tree nuts and soy foods
🥚-Intake of animal foods should not exceed 2 servings per day, with one being dairy (one cup of milk or 20 to 30 g of hard cheese), and the other one being non-dairy (75 to 100 g of fish, poultry or eggs)
🍠-Replacing animal source foods with plant based alternatives like nutrient dense vegetables, legumes or soy foods is encouraged
🍗-If meat is to be consumed, poultry should be prioritized over a red meat
🌾-Replace refined grains with whole grains (brown rice, oats, bulgur etc)
🌻-Replace saturated oils with unsaturated: olive oil, soybean oil, canola oil, sunflower oil
**See the photo below from EAT for specific recimmendations**
😳Note that there is no allowance for processed meat like bacon, sausage, ham, etc. This is because even small amounts of processed meat eaten regularly increases the risk of colorectal cancer. In addition, diets that include large amounts of red meat (or smaller amounts of processed meat) are linked to higher LDL cholesterol, inflammation, and greater risk of heart attack and stroke.
**See the infographic below showing how our North American diets compare to the PDH.
-Note that we eat FAR TOO MUCH: milk, poultry, eggs, red meat, root veg (mostly potatoes), oil and sugar.
Note that we eat FAR TOO LITTLE: vegetables, whole grains, fruit, legumes, nuts and seeds.
This is the definitive resource for a healthy and sustainable diet.
The good news is that this dietary pattern is already recognized by major organizations like Canada’s Food Guide, the World Health Organization, the Amarican Heart Asociation and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.
🌎For more information, listen to this 40 minute podcast discussing the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-lancet-voice/id1499803146?i=1000729787674
🌎Short on time? Have a look at this 12 minute video discuss discussing the planetary health diet:
 https://youtu.be/qVaDbTZK7u0
🌎Really short on time? Watch this two minute video summarizing the need for and the benefit of a planetary health diet:
 https://youtu.be/PIc42oIU0Ik
What do you think? Can you move towards the PHD? What initial steps might be easy to take?
