Your grandparents were right all along. Our good old daal sabzi is indeed the best kind of diet, announced a major study.
Scientists have proposed a global solution to feed healthy, sustainable diet to 10 billion people by 2050, as per a new report published in the medical journal The Lancet. They have developed a diet that can improve health while ensuring this sustainable solution.
The EAT-Lancet Commission, which undertook the study, has recommended the ‘Planetary Health diet’ which can help balance human and planetary health.
The Commission is a 3-year project that brings together 37 experts from 16 countries with expertise in health, nutrition, environmental sustainability, food systems, economics and political governance.
The report quantitatively describes a universal healthy ‘reference diet’. This is to provide a basis for estimating the health and environmental effects of adopting an alternative diet to standard current diets, many of which are high in unhealthy foods.
The report states that currently 820 million people have insufficient food and consume an unhealthy diet. A population growth of 10 billion people by 2050 will aggravate the food situation worldwide.
Speaking about the current food shortage in the world, co-lead Commissioner, Dr Walter Willett, Harvard University, USA, said:
The EAT-Lancet Commission has suggested some important scientific steps to achieve substantial dietary shifts worldwide:
Dr Richard Horton, Editor-in-chief at The Lancet, said:
The report states that ‘unhealthy diets are the leading cause of ill-health worldwide’ and following the Planetary diet could avoid ‘approximately 11 million premature deaths per year’ due to malnourishment.
The diet would also improve nutrition globally and cut the greenhouse gas emissions to ‘levels compatible with the Paris Agreement on climate change’ and also reduce loss of biodiversity and limit ‘agriculture’s demand for land, water and nitrogen’.
The EAT-Lancet Commission is one of several reports on nutrition being published by The Lancet in 2019.
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