Follow the science....

If you need any convincing that plant based is best, well I’ve got something that's going to do that for you. A group of the top medical minds in the world, put together by the world’s most prestigious medical journal The Lancet, have concluded that a plant predominant diet is best for human health.

Given that The Lancet is probably the most well-known and respected medical journal in the world, if it publishes something, we can be pretty sure the science is spot on.

The EAT-Lancet Commission, comprising 37 world leading scientists from 16 countries, was created to research all the available science and reach a consensus on healthy diets and sustainable food production.

There’s no debate that unhealthy diets are now the leading risk factor for global burdens of disease with growing rates of noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and cancers. The fact that junk food and fast food are contributing to diseases is widely accepted.

The results were unequivocal. The Lancet has named the best possible eating lifestyle for humans to be what they call “the planetary health diet” and it’s completely based around plants.

If I drew a diagram of the Planetary Health Diet as defined by the world’s experts, it would feature half a plate of fruits, vegetables and nuts. The other half consists of primarily whole grains, plant proteins (beans, lentils, pulses), unsaturated plant oils, modest amounts of meat and dairy, and some added sugars and starchy vegetables.

The findings of the Commission provide the first ever scientific targets for a healthy diet and sustainable food production within planetary boundaries that will allow us to feed up to 10 billion people by 2050.

I noted recently that our bad eating habits cost the Australian taxpayer around $25 billion a year. That’s a huge amount of money that puts a massive strain on the national and State budgets, and it all comes out of our pockets.

According to the Lancet “…generalized overconsumption as well as overconsumption of unhealthy foods lead to incredible strains on public health and has severe consequences on natural resources and the environment….”

The funny thing is that if we’d grown up eating plant based, if it was the only food we’d been fed, we’d think it was completely normal. We would love the food, we would eat it and not even question it. It would just be “what I eat”.

Adopting the TINAD lifestyle eventually creates this paradigm. Those of us who embrace a plant predominant diet find that the foods we look forward to have completely changed; the things that we might once have craved have been replaced by a whole new set of foods.

Our tastes can, and do, change when subjected to a new way of eating.

And for many people it’s not going to be a wholesale “all in” adoption, it’ll be a simple matter of adding and replacing some foods with others; of cutting back and adding in. Getting more vegetables and plant foods into your families’ diet is easy – and has the support of the world’s scientific community.

You vaccinate to stop disease because the science says it’s a good idea. Now eat property because the science says it’s a good idea.

Learn more about the EAT Lancet Commission at https://eatforum.org/eat-lancet-commission/