Vegetarian Diets: Planetary Health and Its Alignment with Human Health

Abstract

To maintain planetary health, human activities must limit the use of Earth's resources within finite boundaries and avoid environmental degradation. At present, food systems account for a substantial use of natural resources and contribute considerably to climate change, degradation of land, water use, and other impacts, which in turn threaten human health through food insecurity. Additionally, current dietary patterns, rich in animal products and excessive in calories, are detrimental to both population and planetary health. In order to resolve the diet-environment-health trilemma, population-level dietary changes are essential. Vegetarian diets are reported to be healthy options. Most plant-sourced foods are less resource intense and taxing on the environment than the production of animal-derived foods, particularly meat and dairy from ruminants. This review article explores simultaneously the environmental sustainability of vegetarian diets, and its alignment with people's health. In general, the progression from omnivorous to ovolactovegetarian and vegan diets is associated with increased environmental sustainability. Greenhouse gas emissions resulting from vegan and ovolactovegetarian diets are ∼50% and ∼35% lower, respectively, than most current omnivore diets, and with corresponding reductions in the use of natural resources. Concomitant health benefits could be obtained by shifting from current dietary patterns to sustainable vegetarian diets. Thus, there seems to be an alignment of health and environmental outcomes for vegetarian diets. Although this shows the human health and environmental sustainability benefits of vegetarian diets in high-income countries, questions remain about the challenges in other contexts and the political will to promote meat-free diets as the social norm.

Intake of Dietary Salicylates from Herbs and Spices among Adult Polish Omnivores and Vegans

“…A plant-based diet is recommended by many authorities as nutritionally adequate, appropriate for all groups of people in the prevention and management of several diseases [54,55]. It has been well recognized that the occurrence of some chronic diseases among the adult population following plant-based diet is lower [11,[56][57][58]. However, some authors suggest that the existing data do not allow us to clearly evaluate the health benefits and risks of vegetarian type diets on the nutritional or health status of children and adolescents in developed countries [59,60].…”

A review of research on plant‐based meat alternatives: Driving forces, history, manufacturing, and consumer attitudes

“…Four types of modeled meat replacers, including vegetarian, vegan, insect-based, and fortification-free, were compared, and the result indicated that vegan replacers can reduce up to 87% of indictors such as climate change, land use, and fossil fuel depletion (Van Mierlo et al 2017). Fresán and Sabaté (2019) also estimated that progression from current omnivore diets to vegan and ovo-lacto vegetarian diets can achieve about 50% and 35% decrease of GHG emissions, respectively. Therefore, shifting the global food production system to more sustainable means by focusing on plant-based alternatives will help to protect limited natural resources and ensure that a sustainable environment can be maintained for human survival.…”

“…Although replacing meat in our diet with PBMA can provide health and environmental benefits (Hallström et al, 2015;Fresán & Sabaté, 2019), the majority of consumers remain unwilling to completely transit from the consumption of meat to PBMA (Slade, 2018). Until recently, both traditional and first generation PBMA products have been mainly targeted toward vegetarians and occasional meat eaters, who do not expect similar textures and tastes to meat from plant protein alternatives.…”

Development of a Danish Adapted Healthy Plant-Based Diet Based on the EAT-Lancet Reference Diet

“…The negative climate impact (greenhouse gas emissions) resulting from more plant-based diets (both theoretic and real plant-based diet scenarios, i.e., self-selected diets) has been found to be ∼20-35% lower than regular diets, and ∼45-50% lower than vegan diets of the currently commonly consumed diets in high-income countries [12,13]. Variable effects on land use have been reported, e.g., a median reduction of ∼15% for diets with meat partially replaced by plant-based food [12] and a median reduction ∼50% for vegan diets [13]. On the other hand, replacing animal-based foods in the diet with plant-based foods does not always imply lower blue water use (surface and groundwater), as e.g., fruits, nuts and pulses can be more dependent on irrigation than animal foods [14].…”