Abstract
ABSTRACTThe recently published EAT-Lancet Commission report on dietary impacts on the environment suggested that their proposed diet could prevent more than 10 million annual premature mortalities from noncommunicable diseases globally. The report did not meet standards for transparency and replicability, nor did it fully account for statistical uncertainty. Our attempt to replicate the mortality calculations for the United States revealed flaws in the assumptions and methods used to estimate the avoided mortalities. After correcting some calculation errors and fully accounting for uncertainty in the avoided mortalities, the mortality reduction effect of the EAT-Lancet proposed diet in the USA is no greater than the impact of energy consumption changes that would prevent under-weight, over-weight, and obesity alone. As our findings call into question the global conclusions of the EAT-Lancet report, futher independent validation is needed before it can be used to inform dietary guidelines.
Highlights
The recently published EAT-Lancet Commission report on dietary impacts on the environment suggested that their proposed diet could prevent more than 10 million annual premature mortalities from noncommunicable diseases globally
On January 16, 2019 the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems published its recommendation for a “universal healthy reference diet” (REF) [1]
The sustainability of the proposed REF diet was evaluated, the daily dietary recommendations were based only on health considerations – measured through prevented mortality – and nutritional content, using methodology further described in Springmann et al [2]
Summary
The recently published EAT-Lancet Commission report on dietary impacts on the environment suggested that their proposed diet could prevent more than 10 million annual premature mortalities from noncommunicable diseases globally. The sustainability of the proposed REF diet was evaluated, the daily dietary recommendations were based only on health considerations – measured through prevented mortality – and nutritional content, using methodology further described in Springmann et al [2].
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