Scientists have seen the future, and it is neither delicious nor satisfying.
Or at least that’s the considered judgment of a panel of distinguished doctors and researchers, who recently published the “Planetary Health Diet,” in the British medical journal Lancet. By 2050, the world population is expected to hit 10 billion, and with the threats posed by climate change and other environmental concerns, the scientists say we’re going to have to radically change our diet to save the earth. Accordingly, they make exacting recommendations about what we can eat if we want the planet to continue to accommodate us.
The most restrictive aspect of the diet is that a person of average size is graciously allowed 78 grams of meat a day, which works out to be a little more than a pound of meat a week. Since some meats are less healthy and more resource intensive to produce than others, they also set specific limits on how much of what kind of meat you’re allowed. You’re limited to eating just under 3.5 ounces of red meat, pork or beef, each week, with the rest almost equally divided between chicken or fish. Our dietary overlords allow us an egg a week, and the limits on dairy are comparable to one glass of milk a day.
The majority of protein in the “Planetary Health Diet” comes not from animals, but from nuts and legumes. You don’t have to be a particularly enthusiastic carnivore to look at this diet and channel TV’s loveable libertarian, Ron Swanson: “There’s been a mistake. You’ve accidentally given me the food that my food eats.”
Despite dramatic restrictions on meat, the diet has received extensive and uncritical media coverage from many major news outlets. After explaining that you’re allowed less red meat each week than is found in a typical hamburger, a subheading in a BBC article on the diet dares ask the question almost no one was considering: “Why isn’t meat being banned?” Walter Willet, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who helped formulate the diet, told the BBC, “If we were just minimizing greenhouse gases we’d say everyone be vegan,” before conceding that an entirely vegan diet may not actually be a healthy recommendation for most people. So they’re literally throwing us a bone.
The Lancet commission does make bold claims about the diet’s health benefits, asserting it would prevent as many as 11 million premature deaths a year. That’s about one out of every five adult deaths. But even if you take their calculations at face value, this assumes that billions of people make a series of optimal choices every day, and everything we know about the intersection of human nature and public health guidelines suggests this isn’t going to happen willingly.
One news outlet did attempt to answer the most pertinent question raised by the “Planetary Health Diet.” Wired cut to the chase and told us, “Here’s how to get everyone to adopt the planetary health diet.” After a great deal of thumb-sucking about the effectiveness of public health campaigns, buried near the end of the article is this admission: “In the last few years, as the impact of the livestock industry on the global climate has become increasingly publicized, researchers have started to suggest that a meat tax is inevitable.”
Indeed they have. Before the recent spate of articles about the “Planetary Health Diet,” there was a flurry of articles this past November highlighting a recent Oxford University study advocating a meat tax. The media coverage of this study was, again, about as probing as we’ve come to expect. “’Meat taxes’ would save many lives and cut health care costs, study says,” was the headline at CNN.
According to the Oxford researchers, $172 billion a year could be raised globally to address climate change and pay for public health costs by putting a 20 percent tax on red meat, and a 100 percent tax — yes, 100 percent — on processed meats. But despite putting out an extensive study alleging the salutary effects of a meat tax, Marco Springmann, leader of the Oxford study, assured us in the press release, “Nobody wants governments to tell people what they can and can’t eat.”
Lancet has no such compunctions. On Jan. 27, two weeks after releasing the “Planetary Health Diet,” the Lancet Commission on Obesity released a curious report that appears less focused on public health and more on heavy-handed political intervention.
“Rejecting the ‘structures, practices, and beliefs that underpin capitalism in its present form’, they call for ‘a more state anchored approach’ in which the government gives money to activists to lobby the least accountable governmental institutions while cutting the food industry out of the conversation,” said The Spectator’s Christopher Snowdon, summarizing the report. “This is the model that has served the anti-tobacco movement well for many years and [study authors] Swinburn et al. intend to copy it wholesale, starting with a ‘Framework Convention on Food Systems’ modeled on the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).”
While it’s true that most of us in the developed world would be healthier if we ate less red meat, along with less sugar, processed carbohydrates, and many other things, the idea that we’d regulate these things as we do cigarettes has proven unworkable. As it turns out, intervening in a market as large as food sales can have serious economic and political consequences.
In 2017, for example, Chicago wilted in the face of public outcry and repealed its penny-per-ounce soda tax after just two months. In 2012, Denmark abandoned a tax on saturated fats that had been in effect for 15 months. The tax was widely hailed by public health officials and was passed with near-unanimous parliamentary support, but soon Danes were driving across the border en masse to buy fatty foods tax-free, and the tax was linked to job losses and increased inflation.
The public is also right to worry that once laws designed to restrict food choices in the name of health are established, they are unlikely to be left alone. In April of last year, the U.K. enacted a tax targeting sugary beverages, which has succeeded in nudging soft drink manufacturers to reduce the amount of sugar included in their beverages. While it’s too early to tell whether the law will have an impact on public health, or foment widespread backlash, that hasn’t stopped anti-sugar crusaders from demanding even more restrictions.
Not content with their major beverage victory, U.K. anti-sugar group Action on Sugar, for example, is now calling for reductions in the amount of sugar in jam, marmalade, and chocolate spreads, as well as a ban on milkshakes at certain restaurants and fast food chains. Gone is any pretext that consumers may be unaware of the sugar content of deceptively marketed beverages high in corn syrup. Now it’s direct assault on foods and sweets explicitly known to be sugary. It’s one thing to tell people they shouldn’t make certain choices, even to attempt to disincentivize those choices, but it’s quite another thing to restrict the basic freedom to eat what you want, especially when the vast majority of people have foods such as milkshakes pretty rarely.
All this serves to illustrate that, at heart, these crusades are not really about helping others be healthy as much as forcing them to submit to yet another fanatical utopian ideology. Even setting aside explicitly unhealthy choices, it seems the food police are just as willing to restrict healthy food choices as they are to outlaw unhealthy habits. Far from a sensible program to reduce obesity, the “Planetary Health Diet” paternalistic meat restriction may actually do the opposite. Research increasingly shows that a greater intake of protein-dense foods helps combat obesity. That’s because protein, compared to other macronutrients, is more satiating, and protein consumption is linked with the release of hunger-suppressing hormones. The “Planetary Health Diet” would have you consume many more legumes for protein, but an ounce of chicken breast has over 3.5 times the amount of protein than an ounce of lentils for only about 1.5 times the calories. And even when consuming an equal number of calories, the smaller serving of chicken is significantly more likely to curb your appetite than the larger serving of lentils.
The reality is that nutritional needs can vary wildly from person to person, and the public is understandably jaded after decades of constant bombardment with new and contradictory dietary advice from public health officials. Beyond that, it might be a big understatement to say that the environmental impacts of food production, to say nothing of the ethical concerns, may need to be addressed.
Still, scientists looking to address environmental concerns would do well to focus on innovation — lab-grown meat looks particularly promising right now, for instance — rather than on politics. They can demand people eat less meat all they want, but previous attempts at drastic dietary interventions suggests they’ll have to pry the savory, dead flesh from our cold, dead hands.
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.
