09 Feb WWF encourage planet-based diet
The WWF report Bending the Curve: The Restorative Power of Planet-Based Diets joins other efforts to demonstrate the negative health and environmental consequences of our current way of producing and consuming food, while proposing ways to turn this around.
The report opens with the assertion that our food system must provide healthy, safe, affordable and nutritious diets for all, with reference to the UN Food Systems Summit later this year and the Sustainable Development Goals. This is completely in line with the principles of SNI: nutrition must come first when considering the global food system. The report then goes on to define planet-based diets as win-wins: healthy and with low environmental impacts and explores how these can be achieved.
A major recommendation of the report is that national dietary guidelines need to be more ambitious. This echoes a results of a previous WWF model. Currently, these guidelines largely reflect a healthier version of current consumption patterns and do not consider environmental impacts. The report argues that guidelines could be simultaneously healthier and more sustainable.
The main health recommendation of the report is to increase the plant-based proportion of the diet and decrease overconsumption. This is supported by the Global Burden of Disease study findings, indicating that low wholegrain and fruit intake, as well as high sodium intake, were the greatest dietary risk factors.
Beyond these overarching directions, recommendations for dietary and production change vary on a regional level. This is due to the difference in dietary, health and environmental factors seen in different parts of the world.
Countering biodiversity loss also requires a nuanced approach. For example, the report finds that most of the biodiversity loss associated with the Danish diet is due to imports of coffee, tea, cocoa and spices. Contrastingly, red meat holds this place for Latin American countries.
Similarly, the report states that we must feed our population on existing agricultural land and not further expand, but again the implications vary by region. Countries suffering from widespread undernutrition may need to expand their agricultural land to ensure healthy diets for their population, while more developed countries may need to contract.
The same regional variability is true for the planting of trees for carbon sequestration, conversion of grazing land to arable or optimising water use. The results of the report emphasise careful consideration of actions at a national level, as healthier diets can lead to increased environmental damage of one kind or another in vulnerable regions. A one-size-fits-all approach will not lead to a sustainable food system.
Photo by Tomas Tuma on Unsplash
