The EAT Lancet Diet Plan: A Comprehensive Analysis

Is the EAT Lancet Diet Plan the solution for personal health and planetary well-being? Explore a detailed analysis that unveils the reality behind its glossy promises, and discover the potential consequences it holds for our health and the environment.

EAT Lancet, released January 2019, claims to be the ‘plant-based’ solution we’ve all been waiting for to save our health and the planet.

Unfortunately, on closer inspection, EAT Lancet seems to be largely a continuation of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans that will perpetuate unsustainable growth in the processed products of large-scale agriculture.

Rather than being whole foods plant-based, EAT Lancet primarily promotes agricultural grains and processed oils that will most likely leave you hungry and join the growing ranks of our obese, malnourished and diabetic population.

While these new guidelines may help the planet by making you and your children incapable of procreating, they are unlikely to make you healthier, happier or skinnier in the process.  

With about half the calories coming from carbohydrates in the form of wheat, rice, corn, and soy, along with a generous helping of refined oils (chemically extracted from corn and soy), the EAT Lancet diet (whether intentionally or by accident) has stumbled upon the perfect formula that will drive you to consume more of the food-like products that the EAT Foundation group of companies (who are generously bankrolling the extravaganza) will benefit from you consuming more of!    

There are plenty of opportunities to improve our food system and produce more nutrient-dense, high-satiety food in a regenerative manner that will reduce our impact on the planet.  However, after a closer review of the ‘nutritional guidance’ proposed by EAT Lancet, it’s hard to embrace these recycled dietary guidelines for the world as the solution we need to lead us out of our current nutritional or environmental wilderness.

What is EAT Lancet?  

According to the press release, the EAT initiative was spearheaded by billionaire model-come-doctor Gunhild Stordalen, an animal activist and environmentalist who married hotel mogul Petter Stordalen in Scandinavia’s most expensive wedding.  

Gunhild plays the role of the attractive, slim, passionate figurehead of this new ‘plant-based’ movement, and it looks like she is having a great time doing it!

Stordalen is also surprisingly enchanting when she talks about the mandate they now have to overhaul nutritional and economic policies internationally in partnership with the United Nations.

The nutrition lead for EAT is Harvard’s Walter Willett, who is well known for his anti-cholesterol, industrial agriculture-centric dietary approach driven by an aggressive avoidance of saturated fat in favour of unsaturated fats and ‘heart-healthy whole grains‘.  

The EAT Foundation has produced a slick and well-funded PR campaign, including numerous international launch events.  

It’s an enchanting and emotive narrative!  You would feel like you’re doing something good for the planet and follow their advice.  

However, if I were to put my conspiracy touting tinfoil hat on for a moment, I would say that it is hard to separate climate science, from animal activism, environmental sustainability, religious belief and epidemiological mumbo jumbo, from nutritional science from the commercial interests of the founding companies trying to win the hearts and minds of the consumers.  

There is likely a bit of everything going on here.  We all have our biases and beliefs that we bring to the table in any discussion, particularly when it comes to our food choices, which are so wrapped up in our identity.

For more info, you can read the full EAT Lancet report here (Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT -Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems) or check out the launch video here (complete with an emotive poem by 14-year-old environmental ambassador Penelope.  You would be heartless if you were not moved her call to action!). There are many points that I agree with and a number that I don’t.  I’ll leave you to watch and/or read for yourself and make your own judgement.

There has already been a lot written on the motives and validity of the environmental claims behind the EAT Lancet report so I will not try to duplicate them.

I first came across the EAT Lancet diet when I was asked what I thought of it from a nutrient-density and satiety perspective. So, I will try to focus on adding to the nutrition side of the discussion.

What is the EAT Lancet diet?

Unfortunately, there aren’t any food lists or meal plans to be seen in the report of the accompanying materials.  The essence of the food recommendations of Eat Lancet is shown in the table below from the summary brochure.


The first thing that is disturbing about this is that the second column is incorrectly labelled ‘macronutrient intake’ rather than ‘food group’. You should fail Nutrition 101 for that rather than be published in the Lancet!

Who did the “peer review” for this? Is anyone else a little scared that the people setting international food policy complete with aggressive taxation schemes to enforce them don’t know what a macronutrient is?

If you want to understand what the EAT Foundation intends to enforce with carbon tax-like international policies in every nursing home, school and government-influenced institution across the world, I recommend that you look past the talk of “plant-based diets” and pictures of fruits and vegetables and examine the detail in this table to see how they are actually planning to shape the international food system.

To help make sense of the recommendations, charted the energy contribution for each of the categories from the table above in the pie chart below.  

The table below shows the food groups ranked from largest to smallest in terms of recommended calories per day.   

food caloriesweighting
1. rice, wheat & corn81132%
2. unsaturated oils35414%
3. dry beans, lentils & peas1726.9%
4. dairy1536.1%
5. tree nuts1496.0%
6. peanuts1425.7%
7. fruit1265.0%
8. sweeteners1204.8%
9. soy foods1124.5%
10. vegetables783.1%
11. chicken622.5%
12. palm oil602.4%
13. fish401.6%
14. potatoes & cassava391.6%
15. tallow & lard361.4%
16. eggs190.8%
17. beef & lamb150.6%
18. pork150.6%
total2500100%

In spite of all the fanfare, the EAT Lancet dietary guidance seems to be an extension of the status quo that is maximising profits for industrial agriculture and driving us to eat more than we need to be focusing on heavily subsidised agricultural grains and the oils we extract from them.  

Other than doubling down on the recommendation to reduce red meat and eggs (which stems back to the temperance movement whose main aim was to stop people masturbating by reducing red meat which produced carnal desires), it seems like big business as usual for the food industry.

With Walter Willett at the helm, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that this looks and feels like an extension of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans now proposed for the world, complete with talk of United Nations level sanctions and taxes to limit meat consumption.  

However, it’s the added fats and oils (mostly from unsaturated fats) as well as flours and cereals (i.e. rice, wheat and corn) that have exploded in our food system and tracked closely with the rise in obesity of the past half-century.  The EAT Lancet guidelines will only exacerbate this runaway trend!  

Consumption of red meat and eggs has already dropped over the past 40 years since the introduction of the 1977 Dietary Guidelines for Americans prepared by the US Department of Agriculture.  The Eat Lancet Guidelines admonition to decrease eggs and beef (whether it be for the environment or due to concerns over dietary cholesterol and saturated fat) will perpetuate the downtrend of these foods in our diet.  

While Walter Willett and friends cite concerns over saturated fat and LDL cholesterol, the reduction in red meat and eggs and the growth in unsaturated fats clearly has not been helping us in spite of fervent belief held by many that there is a causal link between cholesterol in our diet and heart disease.

While Willett talks wistfully and romantically about the benefits of olive oil that was used in healthy Mediterranean diets, olive oil actually makes up less than two per cent of the ‘unsaturated oils’ that we consume. In contrast, subsidised soy, and canola make up more than three-quarters of our vegetable oil consumption.

While consumption of saturated fat has increased marginally over the past century, the use of unsaturated fats (which are actively promoted by Eat Lancet) has been on the rise since around 1910 when we worked out how to extract oil from soy and corn inexpensively using chemical solvents (typically petroleum-derived hexane).

This chart shows the change in the availability of energy from fat in our food system over the past century.  If prioritising unsaturated fat was beneficial for humans (rather than just a cheap and high-profit margin ingredient that food manufacturers have become addicted to) surely it should have started working by now!?!?!  

Unsaturated fats in the form of ‘salad & cooking oils’ have flooded our food system to the tune of an additional 250 calories per day per person over the past four decades.  

Again, the EAT Lancet guidelines will only reinforce this trend by cementing “unsaturated oils” as the second food group after agricultural grains.  

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And it’s not just in America. Vegetable oil consumption is powering on across the world at an alarming rate!  

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While some people are concerned about fat and others are worried about excess carbs, our obesity epidemic has been powered by growth in both refined carbohydrates and unsaturated oils.

Low protein in combination with a mixture of fat and carbs is essentially the formula for hyper-palatable junk food or “comfort food”.  

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The table below shows the foods in the USDA food database that have less than 20% protein, greater than 30% carbs and greater than 30% fat, sorted by nutrient density (ND Score).

names% protein% fat% net carbs% fibreND score
mashed potatoes (with butter)7%42%43%7%33%
chocolate milk15%36%45%4%21%
potato chips5%56%37%2%18%
custard10%50%37%3%17%
french toast14%43%44%0%16%
waffles11%44%45%0%16%
blueberry muffins5%39%55%1%14%
hash brown5%43%48%5%13%
garlic bread10%43%45%3%13%
human breast milk6%55%39%0%13%
ice cream7%48%44%1%12%
pancakes11%39%50%0%12%
blueberry pancakes11%37%52%0%11%
ice cream7%53%39%1%10%
dark chocolate4%53%38%5%10%
Snickers6%44%48%2%10%
popcorn7%49%37%8%10%
cheese bread10%46%42%2%9%
Toblerone4%49%45%2%8%
pecan pie5%47%49%0%8%
acorns6%53%41%0%8%
biscuits8%42%49%2%8%
ice cream cone6%55%38%1%7%
Twix5%54%38%2%7%
Kit Kat5%45%49%1%6%
white chocolate4%53%43%0%5%
choc chip cookies4%42%52%2%4%
Girl Scout Cookies3%46%48%4%3%
pie crust3%51%45%1%2%
Kit Kat5%47%47%1%1%
toffee1%53%46%0%1%
M&Ms4%36%59%2%0%
Milky Way4%37%58%1%0%
Milk Chocolate4%52%42%2%0%

The only natural foods that fit this formula are breast milk (which helps babies grow quickly) and acorns (which enable squirrels to store fat in autumn leading up to winter).

Everything else would be deemed by most people as junk food or comfort food. Whether by accident or good engineering, food manufacturers have discovered the perfect formula for miracle-grown food.

The increase in unsaturated fat combined with an already carb-laden dietary landscape seems to be facilitating the production of manufactured foods that we just can’t stop eating.   

In nature, the combination of fat+carb is only available in autumn to help us eat more to prepare for winter. This special foods combination seem to send a signal to tell our body to build fat to prepare for winter. But our modern food production enables this all year round.  

We see a similar trend in China, with carbs and fat coming together in percentage terms to fuel a similar obesity epidemic.

This trend is also evident in countries that have the means to access more processed foods, which tend to be a mixture of fat+carbs rather than high carb or low carb.  

This chart from Cian Foley of Don’t Eat for Winter shows how obesity rates (green line) tend to increase as our diet consists of a similar combination of carbs+fat.  

It’s not so much the carbohydrates or the fat that is problematic, but rather when they are combined in unnatural combinations. It’s much easier to overconsume food when it fills both our glucose and fat stores at the same time.  Your body LOVES this combination, and it drives an increase in appetite (i.e. hyperphagia).

So, forgive my cynicism, but I can’t help wondering if the EAT Lancet nutritional recommendations aren’t simply designed to perpetuate (through your local taxation legislation) the high-profit margin foods for the founding member companies of the EAT Foundation, which consist of food manufacturers, industrial agriculture companies, fertiliser companies, synthetic meat producers and drug companies (mostly making diabetes medications) who have a keen financial interest in ensuring that the current status quo continues for the foreseeable future!

#followthemoney!

The thin veneer of ‘greenwashing‘ just means that it will continue to dominate our food system into the future for environmentally conscious millennials. By the time we realise what has happened, it will be too late because this ‘plant-based’ ‘sustainable’ approach will be enshrined in international policy.

What are we trying to achieve?

In engineering, we prepare design specifications, project briefs and design reports that explicitly define why we are doing something, what we want to achieve, our priorities and how we’re going to get there before we start actually designing or building anything.

When it comes to nutrition, we also need to understand why we eat and make informed choices in line with those reasons.  

Take a moment to consider why you eat?

  • For entertainment?  
  • For emotional comfort?
  • To save the planet?  
  • To promote regenerative farming practices?
  • To minimise cost?  
  • To help big food manufacturers make more profit?
  • To protect animals?
  • To align with your religious beliefs?  
  • To boost your health and avoid disease?  
  • To get the nutrients you need?
  • To lose weight?
  • To avoid or reverse diabetes?
  • To live a long healthy life.
  • To look good naked?

I passionately believe that every human has the right to know whether the food they eat contains the nutrients that they require to thrive without having to consume excessive amounts of energy.

One thing I do agree with from the EAT Lancet presentation is that we have an epidemic of malnourished obese people!  As shown in the image below (also from the EAT Lancet Launch Presentation), literally billions of people are not getting the micronutrients that they need from the food they eat!  

We have an epidemic of malnourished obese people who continue to eat more and more nutrient-poor food in a futile effort to get the nutrients they require.

If I were to design a comprehensive system to optimise human nutrition, I would put nutrient density front and centre.  

Most people agree that consuming too much energy can lead to obesity, diabetes and metabolic disease.   Longevity and avoiding the diseases of ageing revolve around not overeating.  

Unfortunately, this is difficult in practice because our appetite ensures we consume enough food, especially when the food we consume is engineered to drive overconsumption. The burden of metabolic disease is set to bankrupt our international economy in the foreseeable future.

In order to save the planet, improve human health and rewind the obesity epidemic, rather than focusing on feeding people food that is cheaper to produce that will cause them to overeat, I think we need to start to focus on feeding people quality food that will help them eat less without having to exercise herculean willpower that is destined to fail in the long term.

In nature, animals like bears respond to environmental signals (such as food, temperature and light) to gain fat in autumn to survive winter and then lose it in spring (the two images below are the same bear about six months apart).

Image result for fat bear week

Our current food system keeps us locked in an autumnal fat storage mode, which EAT Lancet hopes to enshrine into international policy.

Our recent satiety analysis of half a million days of food diaries found that it’s the combination of starch and fat that drive people to overeat the most, while foods with more fibre and protein tend to help people to eat less.

In light of this, putting starches and fats first and second makes the EAT Lancet guidelines seem either dumb or disingenuous (depending on whether or not you think they are doing the bidding of the EAT Foundation group of companies or just incompetent to be giving out nutritional guidance).  

As a human, it makes sense to set optimal human nutrition as a priority when making food choices.  With that foundation in place, you can make informed decisions about where you get your food and whether you want to consume more plants or animals in your diet, and whether you want to choose the lowest cost or invest in more sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices.

Nutritional goals

While there are some pretty photos of food in the EAT Lancet report, there are no recipes or meal plans. So I figured I’d do my own comparative analysis based on the recommended intake levels of the various food groups.  

I’ve taken the USDA nutrient database of 8000+ foods and created a conglomerate “food” for each of the lines in the table above and then rebuilt them into a day of ‘nutrition’ based on the calorie targets provided for each category of foods recommended.

Before we dive into the results, I will briefly explain how the analysis works using the example “nutritional fingerprint” chart below, which shows the nutrients per 2000 calories for all the 8000+ foods in the USDA nutritional database.  

At the bottom of this chart, you can see that it’s easy to get plenty of vitamin C, B12, K1 and iron if you eat the foods that are commonly available in the food system.  

At the top, you can see that it’s choline (mainly found in egg yolks), vitamin B5, potassium, magnesium and copper that tend to be harder to obtain in our food system.  

Nutrients in animal-based foods

We can use this nutritional analysis to characterise and rank different diets, such as animal foods, which tend to have less vitamin K1, folate, vitamin C, calcium and magnesium.  If we consumed a little bit of all the animal-based foods available, we would get a nutrient score of 60%.

Plant-based foods

At the other end of the spectrum, we have plant-based foods from which we find it harder to get adequate amounts of omega-3, vitamin B12 and choline.  

Bioavailability and absorption factors aside, if we consumed a little bit of all the plant-based foods, we would get a nutrient score of 50%, which is less than the animal-based foods but still pretty solid.

The most nutrient-dense foods

Where this analysis becomes really useful is when we prioritise foods that contain more of the harder-to-find nutrients.  

As shown in the chart below, we get a fantastic nutrient profile when we focus on the foods that contain more of the harder-to-find nutrients!

The score is due to the fact that 94% of the area to the left of 500% of the adequate intake is filled in.  You may be getting heaps of vitamin K1, vitamin C or vitamin B12, but the nutrients that are not used by your body will be flushed from your body and, therefore, do not contribute to your nutrient score.

While this level of nutrient density is hard to achieve in real life, it seems that people are much more satiated with foods that contain more nutrients per calorie.  

It seems our appetite switches off when we get the nutrients we need without excessive calories as demonstrated by the participants in the recent Nutrient Optimiser Challenge.

EAT Lancet nutrient analysis

The nutrient fingerprint for the Eat Lancet diet is shown below.

With an abysmal nutrient score of 26%, it is significantly less nutrient dense than the average of all of the foods in the USDA database (56%), plant-based foods (50%) animal-based foods (60%) and way behind the most nutrient-dense foods (94%).  

The table below shows the EAT Lancet contributing food groups sorted by descending nutrient score.  

food groupnutrient scoreproteinfatnet carbsfibreenergy density (cal/100g)
vegetables 67%21%8%49%22%58
fish65%69%28%4%0%130
eggs58%41%52%7%0%259
pork57%51%48%1%0%206
beef & lamb57%50%49%0%0%214
chicken54%43%47%9%1%223
dry beans, lentils & peas44%25%8%49%18%165
soy foods41%28%37%31%4%187
dairy37%26%43%31%1%214
peanuts30%16%69%9%5%613
potatoes & cassava27%8%16%67%8%147
tree nuts25%9%58%29%4%552
rice, wheat & corn23%11%6%77%7%302
fruit18%4%4%81%10%93
unsaturated oils7%1%88%11%0%615
sweeteners6%1%0%99%0%336
tallow & lard3%2%85%13%0%770
palm oil3%0%100%0%0%900

For completeness, I’ve also shown the micronutrient fingerprint of each of the food groups below.  

Vegetables

Vegetables score well overall in terms of nutrient density (although lack in vitamin B12 and omega 3, which you will need to obtain from animal sources).  

It’s also worth noting that vegetables have a Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score of 0.73, meaning that less of the protein from vegetables will be available for use in the body relative to animal-based proteins.

According to data from the USDA Economic Research Service, vegetables made up 3.8% of the US food intake (or 2% once you remove potatoes) in 2010.

You might think from all the talk of ‘plant-based diets’ and the pictures of fruits and vegetables in the promotional material that the EAT Lancet is recommending a whole food plant-based diet with heaps of fruits and veggies.

However, I was saddened to see that the actual Eat Lancet guidelines propose that you get only 3.1% of your intake from vegetables (you may need to look closely to see the little grey wedge in the chart below).

Vegetables come in at number ten on the list of recommended food groups in the EAT Lancet report, just before chicken and palm oil but after tree nuts (6.0%), peanuts (5.7%), sweeteners (4.8%) and soy foods (4.5%)!

I have included some images from the EAT Lancet promotional materials below.  Does it look like they’re promoting a whole foods plant-based diet to you?

I suppose what is being proposed is technically a ‘plant-based diet’ if you consider corn, soy and wheat (grown using large-scale agricultural practices, mono-cropping and large doses of fertilisers and chemical pesticides) and the oils that you can extract from them using chemical solvents as ‘plant-based’.

EAT Lancet is good news if you don’t like to eat your veggies. No one will be pressuring you to eat your greens based on this guidance!

Seafood

Seafood is quite nutritious.  However, fish only makes up 1.6% of the EAT Lancet recommended diet profile.

If you’re concerned about saturated fat and/or red meat from an environmental perspective, you could design a very nutritious pescitarian diet by combining fish and vegetables and avoiding nutrient-poor grains and refined oils.  

Eggs

Although the EAT Lancet guidelines only allow the equivalent of 1.5 eggs per week, they are relatively nutritious and a highly bio-available source of protein. It can be hard to get adequate choline to support neurological function without eggs in your diet. The protein in eggs is also highly bioavailable, with a PDCAAS of 1.0.

Red meat

Next in line is red meat, which has a solid nutrient profile.  It appears that the discouraging of red meat is due to a fear of saturated fat and the environmental cost of raising cattle in a confined feedlot. Beef has a PDCAA score of 0.92, meaning that most of the amino acids will be bioavailable to be used by your body.

While red meat and regenerative agriculture are complex topics, I recommend checking out these podcasts for more discussion see:

Many people believe that the modern industrial agricultural practices used to raise cattle (i.e. confined animal feeding operations), as well as the large-scale monoculture farms that are reliant on fossil fuel-based fertilisers and chemical pesticides, are unsustainable.  However, it may be wiser to look at how we can improve current practices rather than trying to abandon meat altogether.

As mentioned by Walter Willett in the Eat Lancet launch presentation, growing grains with fertilisers to transport to feedlots to feed cattle that are amped up on hormones and antibiotics is far from ideal.  However, cattle can graze land that cannot be farmed and can also have a positive influence on the health of the ecosystem.

While the EAT Lancet’s 15% protein target would meet the minimum daily intake of protein, it’s worth noting that this is only the minimum required amount to prevent deficiency.  

Our satiety analysis suggests that people who consume more protein experience greater satiety and eat less spontaneously (see Why Does Protein Suppress Your Appetite).  

Your body craves nutrients, including protein, and will continue to eat until it gets what it needs. If you’re trying to lose body fat, then prioritising a higher protein percentage can be a useful hack.  

After spending a LOT of time looking at how we can optimise our food choices for nutrient density, I have found again and again that you cannot create a diet that has high levels of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids that are low in protein.  

Protein simply comes along with foods that have plenty of vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids. By intentionally avoiding protein, we will inadvertently decrease the nutrient density of our diet.

Chicken

While chicken intake is prioritised above red meat by the EAT-Lancet guidelines, it is actually slightly less nutritious.  This is likely in part because chickens are often grown very quickly on grains, under light whereas beef cattle are raised on grass, at least for at least the first part of their life.  

Dry beans, lentils & peas

Lentils, beans and peas can be a good alternative source of protein if you choose not to eat animal products. However, they are less nutrient-dense overall as well as being less bioavailable. You will need to consume a lot more energy to get the protein you need from beans, lentils and peas. Peas also have a PDCAAS of 0.7, meaning that 30% of the protein in the peas will not be bioavailable.

Soy

Soy is another protein alternative if you’re not consuming meat and is used in many meat substitutes.  If your diet relies on large amounts of soy, you will need to ensure you get omega 3, B12, vitamin A and choline from other sources or consider supplementing.  On the upside, soy protein has a PDCAAS of 1.0, while soy has a PDCAAS of 0.91.

Dairy

Dairy is a good source of nutrition, although it can be energy-dense and hence not a great idea if your goal is fat loss.  However, on the upside, protein from dairy is highly bioavailable, with a PDCAAS of 1.0.

Peanuts

Peanuts are an interesting choice as a full food group to make up 5.7% of the EAT Lancet calorie intake (nearly double the recommended intake of vegetables). This is presumably because they were focusing on unsaturated fats and avoiding saturated fats (or because Harvard has received a lot of funding from the Peanut Institute).  

Peanuts contain a moderate level of nutrients but are energy-dense, so they are not a great choice when it comes to satiety and weight loss.  Peanuts also have PDCAAS of 0.52, meaning that only half of the protein in peanuts will be bioavailable.

Potatoes and cassava

Potatoes and cassava have a moderate nutrient profile and are a good source of energy, but not especially nutrient-dense.  The PDCAAS for potatoes is quite high at 0.99, although the overall protein percentage is quite low. Potatoes (often mixed with refined oils in the form of hyper-palatable chips) currently make up about 2% of our diet and more than half of our current vegetable intake.

Tree nuts

Tree nuts (e.g. almonds, brazil nuts, cashews, chestnuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans, pistachios and pine nuts) are not exceptionally nutrient-dense but were presumably chosen to focus on unsaturated fats rather than saturated.  

Rice, wheat and corn

The most puzzling emphasis of the EAT Lancet food recommendations is to focus on rice, wheat and corn (32% of calories), which are relatively nutrient-poor, as shown in the chart below.  The PDCAAS of rice is 0.5 while the PDCAAS of wheat is 0.52, meaning that it will be quite hard to get adequate bioavailable protein from these sources of energy.

These foods are typically cheap because they are heavily subsidised. This means that there is a lot of money to be made from using these foods throughout the food system as the foundation of pretty much you find in the aisles of your supermarket.

The unfortunate reality is that nutrient-dense fresh food has no chance of competing on a price basis with these subsidies in place!

If you were serious about improving the health of the international population, the most obvious thing would be to find a way to wind back the overly generous agricultural subsidies on grains that were designed to encourage farmers to produce cheap calories (see The Biggest Trends in Nutrition for more details for a history of the industrial agriculture and its impacts on our nutrition).

In a world where people were serious about improving population health using a plant-based diet, these subsidies would instead be applied to nutrient-dense vegetables, and the nutrient-poor products of mass agriculture would be penalised.

As monocultures, rice, wheat and corn have a devastating effect on the environment, eliminating all other species from massive areas of highly depleted soil that yield the same crops year after year with only the addition of fertilisers and a narrow spectrum of nutrients that support the speed of growth rather than the broad range of nutrients required for optimal human nutrition.   

If your diet contains high amounts of rice, wheat and corn, then you may need to supplement the following nutrients:

It’s also worth noting that a diet high in grains will contain phytates, which will affect the bioavailability and absorption of essential minerals such as calcium, magnesium and iron, so you may need to check for deficiencies and supplement with these to make up for what your diet will be lacking.  

Fruit

You may be surprised to see that fruit is not a great source of nutrients.  If your diet relies heavily on fruit, there is also a long list of essential micro-nutrients that you will need to supplement with.  

Empty calories

Also astonishing is the fact that almost a quarter of the calories are being awarded to empty calories in the form of unsaturated oils, sweeteners, palm oil, tallow and lard.  

While I have no issue with consuming dietary fat that comes with food (e.g. eggs, meat and fish), recommending significant amounts of added refined fat as an ingredient does not make sense (unless you are knowingly giving a free pass to food manufacturers to continue the status quo!  

Let’s take a moment to compare the ingredients in an Oreo Cookie (which follows the formula for most processed junk food) with the EAT Lancet nutritional guidelines:

  1. Sugar (Eat Lancet #8 @ 4.8%)
  2. Flour (EAT Lancet #1 @ 32%)
  3. Canola Oil (EAT Lance #2 @ 14%)
  4. Cornstarch (EAT Lancet #1 @ 32%)
  5. Soy (EAT Lancet #9 @ 4.5%)

If you want to improve the quality of your diet, it makes sense to avoid these refined food ingredients that provide cheap energy and drive you to consume more of these products.  

Summary

To help you understand the nutritional consequences of these proposed guidelines, I have shown the EAT Lancet nutrient fingerprint (left), the average of all foods in the USDA database (centre) and the most nutrient-dense foods (right) side by side.  If you felt that obtaining adequate essential nutrients from your diet was important to your health, which one would you choose?

The chart below shows a plot of satiety score vs. nutrient density score. If you are concerned about health, diabetes and obesity, you will want to focus on foods towards the top right. The hyper-palatable low-nutrient-density foods that will be enshrined by the EAT Lancet guidelines are in the bottom left. If you want to dig into this data a little more, you can check out the interactive Tableau version of this chart here.)

How does the EAT Lancet diet compare to other options?

The table below shows a comparison of a range of dietary approaches that can be optimised to focus on nutrient density compared to the EAT Lancet recommendations.  

The EAT Lancet recommendations are not worse than the food choices that have been optimised for nutrient density; they have a significantly worse nutrient density score than if you just chose randomly from all the foods available!

In addition to the macronutrient profiles and nutrient score, I have also shown energy density, which is the highest for the EAT Lancet foods!  Foods such as doughnuts and cakes lead to an inferior satiety outcome and overeating!  

The EAT Lancet diet will provide you with a whopping 355 calories per 100g of food compared to the average of 231 calories per gram for all food and 100 calories per 100 grams for the most nutrient-dense foods.

You don’t have to follow a particular nutritional belief system to consume a nutrient-dense diet. We can formulate a high-carbohydrate diet that is nutrient-dense.  

We can also formulate a low-carb diet that is nutrient-dense.  

Our satiety analysis found that the key to taming your appetite is to avoid the combination of moderate carb + moderate fat, which drives binge eating (i.e. hyperphagia).

Foods that are an unnatural combination of carbs+fat send a signal that winter is coming and you need to STORE FAT NOW!

If you can get your carbs to greater than, say, 60% of calories (i.e. no added fats), you will find it very hard to overeat the remaining foods (e.g. plain rice, plain potato, broccoli, tomato etc.). These high-carbohydrate, low-fat foods would be found in temperate climates or in summer.

Conversely, if you reduce your carbohydrate intake to less than a third of your calories, you will tend to eat less spontaneously. These foods are what you might find in colder climates or in winter.

However, we naturally gravitate to the combination of fat+carbs that drive us to eat more. Before we learned to process foods, this food combination was only available for a short time leading up to winter, but now, thanks to the food industry, they are available to you all 24/7/365.

With 46% carbohydrates, the EAT Lancet guidelines will put you in the middle of the hyperpalatable carb rage that will cause you to eat more!

Before we learned to extract oil from soy and corn using hexane, it was generally hard to get fat and starches at the same time. Grains were harvested in summer/autumn, with fat from animals available in winter when there were minimal carbs. But now we can combine ‘unsaturated fats’ with refined starches all year long.

Image result for grain harvest

The satiety analysis suggests that this formula is incredibly powerful. Humans, who are programmed to survive through times of famine and scarcity, are helpless to resist these foods.

This is great for industrial agriculture companies, big food manufacturers and companies producing diabetes drugs, but it is not good for the individual trying to lose weight and get healthy.

What is wrong with our food system?

If you stand back and look at the bigger picture, you’ll see that the dawn of agriculture around ten thousand years ago has had a massive influence on human population growth.

Up until then, humans existed as hunter-gatherers and consumed the animals and plants that were available. This depended heavily on their location and season. There was a symbiotic balance.

Our population did not grow beyond what the earth could sustain. But once we learned to domesticate grains, we stopped moving around, settled down, started to get fatter and made more babies.

This transition facilitated a serious uptick in our rate of population growth and arguably the start of our nutritional downfall. The lack of movement is not just a problem for sedentary humans. Growing the same crops year after year with imported nutrients and fertilisers and raising cattle in a confined feedlot with imported feed is central to environmental biodiversity.

It’s not going to be simple to unwind the situation we have found ourselves in, but progressing regenerative agricultural practices to reconnect crops, animals and people is critical to solving our health and environmental problems.)

Our population growth has continued at a fairly steady pace for the last ten thousand years until the injection of vast amounts of fossil-fuel-based fertilisers and aggressive farming practices in the 1960s brought about another paradigm shift in our ability to produce calories to support population growth.

After a number of major wars and devastating global events, farming practices and policies were overhauled in the 1960s to provide more calories more cheaply to feed America.

America’s farming practices and nutritional policies (e.g. the 1977 Dietary Guidelines for Americans prepared by the US Dept of Agriculture) combined with an increase in the use of chemical fertilisers (from non-renewable fossil fuels) facilitated growth in available energy in the form of rice, wheat and corn as well as unsaturated oils that we extract from these crops using chemical solvents.

Image result for commercial fertiliser use on farms

As well as the intended increase in the production of calories, we have seen a significant drop in the nutritional content of our food and a severe uptick in obesity. The reduction in Vitamin A and B12 in our food system shown below aligns with the release of the 1977 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which encouraged people to consume less meat and eggs (apparently due to concerns about saturated fat).  

The longer-term decrease in calcium, potassium, magnesium and sodium seems to align with the change to more aggressive farming practices, mono-cropping and the use of fertilisers, which are, in effect, pumping energy out of the ground and into our mouths via agricultural crops to overfill your fat stores to make you sick and diabetic.

We have worked out how to produce calories so quickly and cheaply in a way that drives us to overconsume them to the point of crippling our international economies with the health burden while also providing a diminishing nutritional return.

The world will be an interesting place in 2050 if we continue to grow more and bigger humans. Perhaps it would be wiser to focus on quality rather than quantity by focusing on the types of nutrient-dense foods that we thrive on rather than taxing quality food beyond the reach of most people.

Image result for obesity rate projections

How do you rate the chances of reversing this trend by enshrining the foods that have caused it?

We are effectively pumping fertiliser into the ground to get cheap, nutrient-poor food to grow more humans more quickly.  This shift to more and more aggressive agricultural practices has been a raging success and enabled us to fuel growth in humanity (both in number and size).

It’s also an inevitable reality that this party cannot continue indefinitely. The non-renewable resources that we are pouring into our grain, corn and soy fields will run out eventually.

At some point, we will run out of fossil fuels to quickly grow our crops and feed our animals. Once this happens, we won’t be able to feed the massive population that our modern unnatural agricultural practices have made possible. It may not be pretty if we can’t create another option, and it all comes crashing down.

While feeding a future population of ten billion people is a daunting (and potentially highly lucrative) challenge. Whether or not the companies that have profited off this agricultural boom over the past fifty years will be able to change the trajectory by enshrining business-as-usual food guidelines with a thin veneer of greenwashing is doubtful.

So, what is the solution?

If you want to think globally but act locally for you and your family, then what is the solution?  

  1. Prioritise nutrient density.  Food that contains higher levels of nutrients will probably not be grown using the high-yield, low-nutrient practices that are so damaging to our environment and unsustainable.  
  2. Eat plants and animals that were grown for quality rather than speed.  Foods produced with sustainability in mind will be more likely to focus on regenerative farming practices.  
  3. Learn more about the food you eat.  Get to know the people who grow your food.
  4. Invest in regenerative agriculture.
  5. Prioritise food that tastes good.   If it doesn’t need a concoction of chemical flavours and preservatives to disguise the lack of nutrients, it is more likely to be grown for quality rather than speed.
  6. Prioritise satiety.  Eating less because you are satisfied with nutritious food will be good for you and good for the planet.  

How Can I Calculate My Nutrient Intake?

If you’re interested in checking if you’re getting just enough of all the essential nutrients, you can check your nutrient profile using our Free 7-Day Nutrient Clarity Challenge

After a week of tracking your current diet in CronometerNutrient Optimiser will give you a prioritised list of foods and NutriBooster recipes that will help you plug your current nutritional gaps.

Level Up Your Nutrient Density

To help you level up your nutrient density, we’ve prepared a Nutritional Optimisation Starter Pack to ensure you are getting plenty of all the essential nutrients from the food you eat every day.    

The free starter pack includes:

  • Maximum Nutrient Density Food List
  • Sample Maximum Nutrient Density Recipe Book
  • Sample Maximum Nutrient Density Meal Plan.

To get started today, all you have to do is join our new Optimising Nutrition Group here

Once you join, you will find the Nutritional Optimisation starter pack in the discovery section here.

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30 thoughts on “The EAT Lancet Diet Plan: A Comprehensive Analysis”

  1. One thing I have learned spending years trying to figure out which of the thousands of “eat this not that” recommendations to follow, is that everyone telling me what to eat has an agenda. While I appreciate the analysis and the information, I am just as cautious about listening to your recommendation as I am to the EAT Lancet group. I mean how do I know that you are not being secretly funded by the meat industry? The truth is there is room for more vegetables in our diets and we could be just a little bit less meat obsessed. I actually think the world would be a bit better off if first world peeps would start having a few alt meat nights in a week. And maybe consider a portion of meat to be a bit less than half the cow. Yeah, you make a good point about micronutrients and refined carbs and all the rest. But despite the weird fixation of EAT Lancet on wheat, rice and corn (wtf is it with the US and corn??) they did say “whole grains”, which you conveniently ignored. When you ignore that recommendation and throw out accusations that they are trying to get us dummies to eat more refined carbs (because we all clearly just do whatever the latest study tells us to) then that makes me twice as suspicious that you have your own agenda. Because focusing on the part that proves your point and ignoring the part that doesn’t is what all the other bogus food science does. So what makes you better? What makes you more trustworthy? If you are manipulating one fact, what other facts are you manipulating? You are all the same in my book.

    • So what other whole grains are missing? Barley, Millet, Oats? They weren’t listed specifically in EAT Lancet although there was an ‘Other’ category.

    • Amanda, the article points out that the EAT guidelines advise a cut in vegetable consumption and points out this is absurd.

      There is nothing anti-vegetable in the article at all. Quite the opposite, graph after graph showing the good things in vegetables, beans and legumes.

      In fact, it looks like you really didn’t read it thoroughly. Either that or you’ve done exactly what you’re accusing the author of doing only 100 times worse! You have ignored the parts that don’t fit the conclusion you already had before reading it. Or you’re being funded by EAT 🙂

      A shame you missed it, because it is one of the most unbiased, thorough articles on nutrition I have read.

      • Thanks Man!

        Yeah, I’m definitely a fan of people eating more nutrient dense veggies and was saddened to see what the fine print actually says in terms of veggies. So glad you like the article.

        Marty

      • I did not see anything biased either. Looks like Amandas own bias has gotten in the way, because she just does not want to believe it. Great article, thanks to Marty, I love his thorough analaysis.

    • Thanks for taking the time to read and leave the first comment Amanda. I’m not sure why the meat industry would pay me as I’m not really a big proponent for red meat or pork. I am however a big fan of nutrient dense vegetables and foods that will give people health, vitality and satiety. I pay my own bills as an engineer. I understand how to use a spreadsheet and the USDA food database. This was a weekend’s work in my spare time. I try to show all my working so that anyone else can understand what I’m saying and cross check it if they’re actually interested.

    • Hi Amanda. I’m a Medical LCHF Nutrition educator. It’s exhausting helping patients who have been brain washed by the “pseudo-health” industry. The key to distinguishing if someone is bogus or not is asking…are they selling a product? Marty is not. I am not. After 45 mins in my consult room the patient walks out with a free slimfolder of information. Not powders,supplements or pills. Being healthy is simple and free. It’s not and never has been complicated. The commercial food industry has purposefully made it consuming. Simply look at a nutrition panel on food as an eg of this. If you want to be health pay the butcher or the grocer to deliver real food to your kitchen, cook it yourself and eat it. Your body just does the healing of chronic disease automatically from then on. Profound.

    • Omnivorous is multiple in choices, it makes biological sense, but when it comes to sugar, wheat, grains mostly, processed chemically laden crap, it doesn’t take long to figure out what’s best, those being dreadful excuses for food, they aren’t they’re lab creations designed to addict the masses, addiction to both the physiological and the psychological of those caught in that web, and every overweight and obese person is. Organic, grass fed, pastured eggs, minimal fruits, some vegetables, no trans fats, or god awful oils, etc. follow what your gut tells you. I was poisoned by arsenate (lead and arsenic in solutions) eating Bing cherries and the owner sprayed me, I was four years old. I got very ill eating candy, white bread & applesauce at 17 years old, plus skim milk, powdered coffee and sugar added, sick, sick, sick. My sister took me into her home, fed me a balanced diet and in a month I was healthy. What did she feed me. Meat, eggs, whole milk, vegetables, minimal fruit (largely because I am not that interested or drawn to fruit, but I like blueberries and strawberries, all organic, of course) salad, grapes, etc., and I felt wonderful in a short time

  2. Great analysis! It’s hard to believe that the Eat Lancet is actually what they came up with (nutritionally wise). It’s definitely just a corporate program. I don’t see how this is going to be accepted either. I’m wondering if the leaders of this program actually eat this way. Doubting it. Like to see how they look in 10-20 yrs.

  3. This is the same old playbook with a new cover and new marketing behind it. If you squint your eyes and look at it with a sideways angle, you’ll see that it doubles as a playbook for how to get rich.

  4. So what can we do about this… Should these guidelines be put to Parliament so they can be challenged? I’m getting fed up with being told what to eat and all this conflict.

    • I think helping people understand the value of nutrients in their food as well as the impact on the environment is part of the solution.

    • Thanks Kevin. I’ve had another read through. Let me know if you see anything else that needs attention.

    • I’ve taken another read through the document and fixed a number of things. Let me know if you see anything specific I should update/fix. Feedback is always appreciated.

  5. Vegans, vegetarians, and other nut cases are frothing at the mouth and other less visual places and dispersing the usual idiotic BS. 84% drop out of Vegan lunacy and about 58% out of vegetarianism. The companies who prosper from this do not eat what they produce. They know it’s purely a way to increase company profits. Meanwhile the little people, and I’ve met a few of these juvenile misfits run around eating their bananas, pouring soy oil on their fake eggs, meat, and drinking soy, or almond milk as it it’s a sure path to the promised land. So what’s in soy milk?
    Soymilk (Filtered Water, Soybeans), Cane Sugar, Vitamin and Mineral Blend (Tricalcium Phosphate, Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Vitamin D2, Riboflavin [B2], Vitamin B12), Sea Salt, Natural Flavor, Gellan Gum. Oh, yummy. and what is the ‘Natural Flavor’ made up of? “Natural flavor (also known as “natural flavoring”) is a catch-all term used on food labels. Many potential food allergens can hide in natural flavor. And what about raw milk from pastured Jersey cows? Are you ready, what are the horrid ingredients so claim vegan nut cases: Milk. Oh me oh my I will surely die from such a thing. Milk? Nothing else? What about hormones? No, none. What about antibiotics? No, none. What about casein? Yes, it’s the protein. Some people can’t tolerate it so the recommendation is simple, don’t drink milk. After all, many people are allergic or sensitive to milk, or eggs, or kale or etc. However, the lack of nutrients in a vegan and vegetarian diet is best reason not to take such diets seriously. It’s a fad that’s become farce. Vegans one day, vegetarians the next, then finally settling down to what they are, Omnivores, with a big O just like all those company executives are who promote vegan idiocy but never become vegans themselves. Yes, that’s already been said. Every cereal company in America encourages this nonsense. Oh, the nearsightedness of business, it’s astounding.

  6. I think this excellent analysis would be strengthened by skipping the “What is EAT Lancet” section which comes across as an ad hominem attack. No matter how accurate, it detracts from the rest of your analysis. There are two separate issues – who is funding and are they biased and/or hypocritical, and what does the science tell us. The former does not matter if their science is correct. A section which outlines YOUR potential bias traps and how you attempt to counter them (and we all do have bias) would be much more convincing and a better advancement of the discussion. Thanks again for all the analysis are excellent visuals.

    • Thanks Beth for taking the time to read the post.

      I have tried to add value in my nutritional analysis so people know what they are getting into and can make a more informed decision.

      I have not tried to address the climate science aspect of the discussion other than to point out that the true long term answer likely lies in regenerative agriculture practices rather than a farming and agricultural practices that are dependent non-sustainable fossil fuel sources.

      I usually try not to make myself the centre of the story, but my conflicts are that I’m a civil engineer by day, a part-time blogger, a father of two teenage kids (who cost a lot to feed well) am married to someone with Type 1 diabetes. I have learned a lot about how to manage blood sugars through diet, but that this does not necessarily translate to health or weight loss for everyone. If it wasn’t clear from the post, my bias is towards a nutrient dense diet that is naturally satiating that is sustainable in the context of the big picture of history. I believe humans should have the choice to make informed decisions about what will benefit their health.

      Once I understood who was funding the whole thing and how nutritional deficient it all was I was angered by the manipulative way the whole thing was presented. Sorry if that came across too thick in my personal blog.

  7. Thanks for putting this together! I can’t imagine doing all this in a weekend. You made a lot of good points.

    There is a large flaw that I feel should be addressed. Non-starchy vegetables have a very low energy density. The EAT Lancet Diet actually recommends consuming vegetables as the largest source of food by mass (300 grams). We should make a chart with the proportion in mass of the recommended amounts. Ideally this would be converted to the form the food is typically consumed in (e.g., cooked grains and beans, raw fruit, etc.).

    Another note is that the EAT Lancet Diet recommended whole grains (which are high in fiber), not refined grains. This was overlooked in this blog. They also put the lower range at zero, which to me implies that they recognize that a healthy diet doesn’t need grains.

    I don’t think the EAT Lancet Diet is ideal, but it’s certainly a lot better than how most people eat.

    • Thanks for reading Ty.

      In calorie terms, the amount of vegetables proposed is actually similar to what we see in the current consumption based on the 2010 USDA ERS data. So as much as it’s promoted as a new plant-based diet the amount of vegetables doesn’t really change from the current eating patterns (even as a stretch goal). See https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-availability-per-capita-data-system/loss-adjusted-food-availability-documentation/ for current consumption.

      It was hard to decide how to cater for ‘refined grains’ vs ‘whole grains’ as there is no such category. It is really quite subjective. In the end, the analysis simply includes all non-fortified grain products in the USDA database. This means that the analysis actually included a lot of unprocessed grain products that very few people eat (other than cattle as a waste product) such as brain and the kernels that contain most of the nutrients in the grains which are commonly discarded in processing.

      It would be nice to believe that the EAT Lancet diet was an improvement but it seems that the resultant nutrient profile is significantly poorer than if you were to simply eat the average of all foods in the USDA database.

  8. Interesting analysis, drowned a bit too much in figures, which do not always back up the arguments made very clearly. Especially more titles for the axes would be useful! E.g. nutrient content vs satiety -> what is your indicator? High satiety level = high nutrient intake (e.g basil?)

    However, thank you for taking the time to gather all these sources together!

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