What we eat needs to be nutritious and sustainable. Researchers are trying to figure out what that looks like around the world.
A clutch of fishing villages dot the coast near Kilifi, north of Mombasa in Kenya. The waters are home to parrot fish, octopus and other edible species. But despite living on the shores, the children in the villages rarely eat seafood. Their staple meal is ugali, maize flour mixed with water, and most of their nutrition comes from plants. Almost half the kids here have stunted growth—twice the national rate.
Iannotti is wrestling with questions that are a major focus of researchers, the United Nations, international funders and many nations looking for diets that are good for both people and the planet. More than 2 billion people are overweight or obese, mostly in the Western world. At the same time, 811 million people are not getting enough calories or nutrition, mostly in low- and middle-income nations.
“We need to make progress toward eating diets that have dramatically lower ecological footprints, or it’ll be a matter of a few decades before we start to see global collapses of biodiversity, land use and all of it,” says Sam Myers, director of the Planetary Health Alliance, a global consortium in Boston, Massachusetts, that studies the health impacts of environmental change.
Such findings are not popular with the meat industry. For example, when in 2015, the US Department of Agriculture was revising its dietary guidelines, which happens every five years, it briefly considered factoring in the environment after researchers lobbied the advisory committee. But the idea was overruled, allegedly in response to industry pressure, says Timothy Griffin, a food-systems scientist at Tufts University in Boston, who was involved in the lobbying effort.
Many scientists say the EAT–Lancet diet is excellent for wealthy nations, where the average person eats 2.6 times more meat than their counterpart in low-income countries, and whose eating habits are unsustainable. But others question whether the diet is nutritious enough for those in lower-resource settings.
Rich diets Nutrition researchers know that most consumers do not follow dietary guidelines. So some scientists are exploring ways to convince people to adopt healthy, sustainable diets. In Sweden, Patricia Eustachio Colombo, a nutrition scientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and her colleagues are quietly testing a sustainable diet in schools.
Across the Atlantic, some academics and restaurateurs are trialling the diet in low-income settings. In Baltimore, Maryland, a collaboration between a catering business and a restaurant, both forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic, started taking donations and providing free meals based on the EAT-Lancet diet to families who live in ‘food deserts’—areas where there is little access to affordable, nutritious food.
Getting that information is crucial, because India ranks 101 out of 116 countries in the Global Hunger Index and has the greatest number of children who are too thin for their height.
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