For me, I know that I have a conscious bias in favour of livestock, specifically, sustainably produced ruminant livestock. I imagine that without such a bias I would find it hard to do this job.
When it comes to diet, it should be no surprise that I also consciously favour inclusion of beef in a healthy diet. Having lived in a variety of countries including India where my diet was very low in animal source foods, I know that I find it easier to find a healthy balance when I include red meat, plenty of fresh vegetables and try to minimize processed foods and sugar.
However, I am not in a position, nor do I have the ambition to make everyone on the planet eat the same diet. We all know that anecdotal evidence is not a scientific basis for recommendations. Similarly we should always bear in mind that association does not prove causation.
Observational Nutritional Epidemiological studies can demonstrate associations between diet and incidence of health problems. Non-randomized studies cannot demonstrate causation. Unfortunately it has been common for decades to treat these epidemiological studies as though they could demonstrate causation, and they have also been used to set national dietary guidelines.
Not surprisingly this has led to some confusion, not least because new studies frequently contradict older ones, thus seemingly upending dietary advice, whereas in fact, it is possible that neither study has direct relevance to a healthy diet (study).
The standard of evidence for dietary advice can be improved through the use of randomized studies and adopting standards for guidelines such as NutirRECS – despite these widely accepted standards for trustworthy guidelines, quality scores of the majority have remained moderate or low.
The Eat Lancet diet was launched to great fanfare (and with a very large publicity budget), touting itself as the solution to "planetary health." The narrow range of contributors in terms of viewpoint and background was glossed over, and the report itself was not peer reviewed. It was in fact only reviewed prior to publication by the EAT Lancet commission, i.e. its authors.
While the ambition seemed rather lofty, the suggestion that a small team of predominantly western nutritional epidemiologists with a couple of agriculturists and climate scientists could design a global diet that would be healthy for both the planet and all of its inhabitants was breathtakingly arrogant.
Few people would disagree that we need to keep human activities within the capacity of the earth to support us, and that we should aim to eat food that keeps us healthy, rather than a diet that gives rise to chronic illness.
Sadly, the history of dietary guidelines coincides with the dramatic rise of non-communicable diseases in western countries, suggesting that until now, policy recommendations based on epidemiological studies have had the opposite to intended effect.
A further confounding factor in any study is the possibility of conflicts of interest. This is unfortunately rife in the field of nutritional epidemiology. (See here for the example of the US 2020 dietary guidelines committee.)
Despite its pretentious name, Eat Lancet was not "commissioned" by any government, block of countries or the UN to undertake their work. It is in fact an NGO, and the special interest groups that fund it are far from free of conflicts of interest.
It also worked entirely top down, without reference to the people who actually produce food, the world's farmers and primary producers, nor to the people who actually eat food, which is possibly why the diet proposed is too expensive for the majority of the world's poor.
The majority of the funding came from processed food companies, who stand to gain financially from its recommendations. While there was a lot of talk about health, the emphasis was more towards replacing whole foods such as meat with highly processed substitutes that are more profitable for the companies that funded the report.
Fortunately the UN WHO withdrew their endorsement before the report was released, realising that this was any but the objective and scientific endeavour that was needed.
The unfortunate thing about all of this is that now that the dust has settled, EAT Lancet has been busy polishing their image. If you search today on Google, you will find little of the backlash. In fact if you were to believe the first few pages of results you would think that there is tacit acceptance of the diet, despite the fact that even Founder and executive Chair Gunhild Stordalen has retreated a little from her vegan position and is now willing to concede the positive role of ruminants in regenerative agriculture (though without any change to the EAT lancet recommendations).
We know that food systems need animals. It is naïve to think that crops could be grown on much of the land we use to produce food, or that it would not impact biodiversity if we were to do so.
Circular systems depend upon livestock to manage by-products that would otherwise be wasted, crop and livestock systems complement each other and should be encouraged to do so more. We also need livestock to drive sustainable development.
Food systems are far too big and far too important to human and planetary health to be the plaything of a few privileged individuals and companies driven by ideology and profit. Food systems that genuinely deliver health for people and the planet have to evolve through bottom up processes.
While the UN and its member states may well have some role to play, farmers, smallholders, ranchers and livestock keepers need to drive any food systems transformation, together with their communities.
