Planetary Health Diet - The Great Misunderstanding
The EAT Lancet Planetary Health Diet (1) has, since its publication in 2019, regularly been cited (including by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung - German Nutritional Society, a largely government funded NGO, designated as appointed authority on nutritional matters) under one particular aspect: the indispensability of this one dietary pattern as the only one that does justice to the aspect of a “healthy planet” (derived from “Planetary Health”).
On closer inspection (2), this appears to be a piece of misinformation that is widespread in reporting on this very cleverly named report. In 2019, Fabrice DeClerck (the corresponding author) responded to Frank Mitlöhner:
…the meat consumption limits proposed by the Commission were not set due to environmental considerations, but were solely in light of health recommendations. The dietary guidelines only refer to healthy eating. Thus is not the diet to reduce climate change, but the diet to reduce the risk of premature mortality due to dietary related health causes…
The report was revised in 2025. The dietary recommendations have not changed significantly, and coverage continues to frame it primarily under the aspect of “planetary health” — but now the following sentence has made it into the report’s own glossary (emphasis mine):
The [Planetary health diet] is based entirely on the direct effects of different diets on human health, not on environmental criteria.
This means that the one aspect usually highlighted, the health of the planet, is explicitly not part of the report — it is not examined within it. Apparently “planetary health” is meant as “this is how the population of the planet should eat in order to become/stay healthy.”
“Planetary” would be better rendered as “global” than as “planetary” in the environmental sense.
What remains is the question: is the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet actually healthy for people? After all, the following sentence appears in the glossary directly after the quote above:
The diet’s name arose from the evidence suggesting that its adoption would reduce the environmental impacts and nutritional deficiencies of most current diets
Even after the first publication there were responses that called this into question. From the abstract of “The EAT-Lancet Commission’s Dietary Composition May Not Prevent Noncommunicable Disease Mortality"(3) (emphases again mine):
…The report did not meet standards for transparency and replicability, nor did it fully account for statistical uncertainty. Our attempt to replicate the mortality calculations for the United States revealed flaws in the assumptions and methods used to estimate the avoided mortalities… As our findings call into question the global conclusions of the EAT-Lancet report, further independent validation is needed before it can be used to inform dietary guidelines.
Admittedly, that was a response to the first version of the report. But that first version has had the greatest impact — many people haven’t even heard about the 2025 update. Besides, the update turned out not to be significantly different from the previous version.
Beyond that, there were many further comments on many aspects, which I list here only partially and in passing, without going into detail:
- The report drew predominantly on epidemiological studies (which can typically only serve to generate hypotheses, not to establish cause-and-effect relationships)
- Eating according to the proposed (prescribed) approach does not provide adequate nutrient supply, but requires supplementation (4)
- The claim to speak for the global world population bypasses the lived reality of many people — particularly those in the Global South — where animals are indispensable on many barren soils to ensure adequate nutrition. This extends to accusations of neo-colonialism.
The occasion for this article was the contradiction between media reporting and the explicit scope and claims of the report. It seems the report’s authors have shown little interest in clearing up this contradiction — at least I have not seen any statement about the reporting beyond that one sentence in the glossary.
I will address the health merits of this approach elsewhere.
