Western diets—chock-full of fat, sugars, and red meat—are notoriously unhealthy. The production of these foods, which often contributes to habitat loss and greenhouse gas emissions, isn’t exactly great for the planet either. So in 2025 the EAT Foundation teamed up with The Lancet to imagine a better world.
The EAT-Lancet Commission tasked experts from a variety of disciplines to create a global diet that would be both healthier for us and healthier for the Earth. The resulting Planetary Health Diet, published in a 2025 report, was a plant-forward diet that strictly limited meats, fats, and sugars. Now, a new study published in Nature looks at how globally adopting the diet would transform agriculture by the year 2050.
According to the study, the most dramatic changes would come in the livestock sector, which would see a 70 percent drop in the production value of cattle, sheep, and goats. Vegetable, fruit, and legume production, on the other hand, would increase by 57 percent. On net, these shifts in land use would open up 6 percent of the world’s farmland for other, more environmentally friendly activities.
Read more: “How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution”
Greenhouse gas emissions would also drop precipitously. Per the study, carbon dioxide emissions from agriculture-related land use would decrease 85 percent by 2050. When you add that to the 15 million fewer premature deaths per year and $10-$20 trillion saved annually prior research has estimated, it sounds like a pretty good deal.
“We should consider these scenarios not as a forecast of what will happen, but as a useful early guide of where challenges and opportunities may arise,” study author Daniel Mason-D’Croz of Cornell University said in a statement. “Which sectors would need to contract, and which would need to expand.”
In fact, the researchers are clear-eyed about the many obstacles standing in the way of widespread adoption of the Planetary Health Diet. For example, accessibility and affordability of healthier foods could represent serious hurdles to changing consumer behavior. Additionally, with this study and so much else in life, there’s no accounting for taste. Still, individual preferences can cut both ways, and “the potential of substantial positive change should not be discounted,” they write, citing social tipping points and health innovations like GLP-1 medications.
“A transformation of this magnitude cannot begin in 2050,” Mason-D’Croz added. “Foresight modelling like that highlighted in this study is a valuable tool to inform actions today for more sustainable, healthy, and just food systems tomorrow.”
Essentially, we can dare to dream, but we can’t afford not to act.
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Lead image: Luis / Adobe Stock
