Source: Rita Jane Gabbett, MEATINGPLACE, 1/16/19



Starting tomorrow, a group called The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health is planning launch events over the next month in five cities around the globe (Oslo, Jakarta, Melbourne, New York and Rome) to promote its new report on health and environmental sustainability. Spoiler alert: It isn’t meat friendly.

The 50-page report, to be published in The Lancet, is expected to advise consumers to drastically reduce their meat and dairy consumption for their health and for the good of the planet.
Animal Ag Alliance Vice President of Communications Hannah Thompson-Weeman wrote in her Meatingplace blog yesterday that the report is expected to recommend people consume red meat no more than once a week and that people in the United States eat 90 percent less beef and pork and half the number of eggs, while tripling consumption of beans and quadrupling nuts and seeds. The report is also expected to favor a meat tax, a tactic that animal activists have been promoting for some time.  

In anticipation of the report, the Animal Agriculture Alliance has set up a website to help members of the meat and livestock industry balance the report’s recommendations with relevant facts.  
On the website, the Animal Agriculture Alliance revealed that while the report’s specific content is secret until it is published in The Lancet, a paper published in the journal Naturepreviewed the report’s conclusions and called for restricting meat consumption to under 14g (half an ounce) per day (about half a slice of roast beef), a radical departure from current U.S. dietary guidance, according to Animal Agriculture Alliance.

EAT is self-described as “a global, non-profit startup dedicated to transforming our global food system through sound science, impatient disruption and novel partnerships.”
On the commission’s website, the group describes its report as “the first full scientific review of what constitutes a healthy diet from a sustainable food system, and which actions can support and speed up food system transformation.”

The commission is comprised of 37 members and is co-chaired by Professor Johan Rockström (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Stockholm Resilience Center) and Professor Walter Willett (Harvard University).

A live-streamed EAT-Lancet lecture will be held in Oslo on Jan. 17 and marks the beginning of a series of global launch events.

Another point of view
The North American Meat Institute notes that consensus dietary guidance recommends meat because it feeds the world delicious and nutritious protein and essential vitamins and minerals that cannot simply be replaced by another food. The group points to the following potential consequences to drastically cutting meat from one’s diets:
• Meat provides all the essential amino acids in our diets. Combinations of plant-based foods and supplements can achieve this result, but must be eaten in the right combinations to ensure no deficiencies.
• Greatly reducing or eliminating meat from the diet would likely result in more food consumption, and thus more calories, to get the same nutrition meat provides.
• Iron in vegetables is less bio-available than in meat. In fact, consuming meat with vegetables enhances iron absorption from both.
• Vitamin B-12, which is essential for brain health, is only available in animal products.
• Extensive research shows that diets without meat can be harmful to brain, bone and muscle health.
• Researchers in the UK recently found that vegan diets are leading to a growth in malnutrition in developed countries.

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