Scientists say encouraging people to eat less meat and more fruits and vegetables could prevent 26 million premature deaths each year.
The University of Edinburgh researchers want people to eat 350 calories of meat, dairy and fish each day – the equivalent of about a large chicken breast.
They estimate that people in the G20 countries eat about 620 calories from animal products on average, which is the same rate as eating two large beef burgers.
Experts claimed that people should also try to consume 720 calories from fruits and vegetables. For example, an apple, a banana, and two peppers contain about 100 calories each.
They say changing eating habits will reduce obesity-related deaths, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.
And the experts behind the proposal – who have also recycled the contested argument that cutting back on meat is good for the environment – argue that policymakers should use Covid-19 recovery plans to push people to eat healthier.
Ayman Sattar, one of the researchers involved in the study, said the analysis showed a “significant benefit” of improving diets.
A poor diet – defined as eating too much salt and not enough whole grains, fruits, vegetables, omega-3s, nuts and seeds – is believed to cause 11 million deaths globally annually from diseases such as heart disease, stroke and colorectal cancer.
It has also linked reducing meat consumption to avoiding early death. Academics in Edinburgh modeled four different scenarios for recovering from Covid, which looked at the impact of including policies designed to promote healthy diets.
The findings, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, claim that a shift toward a plant-based diet could prevent 2,583 premature deaths per million people by 2060.
With the world’s population expected to exceed 10 billion by that year, this means that 26 million fewer people will die in 2060 alone.
Under this strategy, people consumed 2,400 calories a day — 820 calories that came from whole grain foods like wheat and corn. 720 came from fruits and vegetables, with 350 from animal products such as beef, chicken and eggs.
The rest came from oils, legumes, sugar, and starchy roots like potatoes.
By comparison, recovery plans that focus solely on restoring economic activity to pre-pandemic levels could result in an additional 780 deaths per million people by 2060 – the equivalent of about 8 million people each year.
This model assumed that people adhered roughly to historical diets, which consisted of 2,600 calories per day, largely from whole grain products (900), animal products (620) and oil and legumes (492).
The calculations also showed that the transition to a healthy diet also reduced the use of nitrogen fertilizers by 40 million tons and water for fields by 400 square kilometers.
That’s because eating less meat means less space is used for farming and forage for animals, while lower-meat diets also reduce biodiversity and landscape loss, the researchers claim.
“Covid recovery stimulus packages present an opportunity to reduce the impact of the food system on some of the most pressing global challenges,” said Starr, a PhD student involved in the research.
As evidence, the NHS says the average man needs 2,500 calories a day to maintain a healthy weight. For the average woman, that number is about 2,000 per day.
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