The Lancet CommissionsFood in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems
Section snippets
Executive summary
Food systems have the potential to nurture human health and support environmental sustainability; however, they are currently threatening both. Providing a growing global population with healthy diets from sustainable food systems is an immediate challenge. Although global food production of calories has kept pace with population growth, more than 820 million people have insufficient food and many more consume low-quality diets that cause micronutrient deficiencies and contribute to a
What is a heathy diet?
Defining healthy dietary patterns is important for many reasons. For example, they are used to provide dietary guidance to a population, provide assessment and counselling in clinical settings, develop practices and policies designed to enhance diet, and monitor trends in diet quality for an individual or a population. However, practical considerations make defining a global healthy diet challenging. These difficulties include different nutritional needs of people because of age, sex, disease
Earth system perspective on sustainable food production
The need to develop and use sustainable food production practices that safeguard Earth system processes, on which food production and human wellbeing depend, has become widely recognised. Farming and fishing practices are being developed that use ecosystem services such as pest control, pollination, water regulation, and nutrient cycling to achieve productivity and resilience in agricultural landscapes, while reducing harmful environmental effects.137 These practices include many approaches
Lessons from past successful global transformations
This Commission does not underestimate the importance of its message or the urgency of the task it sets, which are in line with international reviews4, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253 of different aspects of global food systems over the past decade. The Commission highlights the need for a Great Food Transformation—ie, a substantial change in the structure and function of the global food system so that it operates with different core processes and feedback. This
Conclusion
The food we eat and how we produce it will determine the health of people and planet, and major changes must be made to avoid both reduced life expectancy and continued environmental degradation. This Commission presents an integrated framework providing quantitative scientific targets for healthy diets and sustainable food production, which together define a safe space within which food systems should operate to ensure that a broad set of human health and environmental sustainability goals are
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