Diet for the Planet

 In Preventive Medicine Column

 

Diet for The Planet

I was privileged to preside one final time as President last week over the annual meeting of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, held at a lovely venue in Naples, Florida. The area around Naples, with leadership from local healthcare systems, is a Blue Zones Project, working to turn the habits of the longest-lived, most vital people on the planet into blue prints for new, local norms. What a perfect place to celebrate the primacy of lifestyle in health.

At my initial suggestion, our conference theme this year was Healthy People, Healthy Planet. I wanted to showcase to our membership, and learn more myself about, the implications of human lifestyle choices for not just our own health, but that of everything around us.

My hopes in this area were richly fulfilled, as leading experts from around the world gave illuminating talks on chronic disease, emerging infections, climate change, water supply, biodiversity, soil quality, sustainable agriculture, and more- and how they all relate to the behavior, and in particular dietary choices, of the roughly 7.5 billion Homo sapiens currently on the planet.

The evidence regarding diet for human health extends to variations on a broad theme of minimally processed foods, mostly plants, in sensible combinations that are often time-honored, and rooted in heritage and cultural practices. But this is just the evidence related directly to human health. There is a critical, indirect consideration at one nominal remove: what about the health of the planet? There is, quite simply, no human health left to worry about on a planet no longer hospitable to our species.

That danger truly looms, and more proximally than most of us care to admit. The case was made in its alarming particulars by a veritable parade of luminaries to our conference podium.

Even as the planetary issues were elaborated, talks in our customary purview- human health- reaffirmed the principles of healthy living to which the College, and the True Health Initiative, are pledged.

The simple, environmental truth is that we must eat less meat- much less. This is the truth both for those long favorably disposed, and for those who find it monumentally inconvenient. The truth is not a contestant in a popularity contest; it’s just the truth. Many of the environmental scientists revealing this truth are not vegetarian, and many in this conversation don’t want to be– but they are doing what honest scientists do, and following their data where they lead.

The audience of diverse health professionals at our meeting was, by all indications, inspired to do everything in our collective power to propagate the message, and advance the mission: diet and lifestyle can, and therefore must, change at scale to help save the planet. In case you want in on it right away, two direct substitutions would make an excellent start: drink plain water instead of soda, and eat more beans and lentils in the place of all varieties of meat, but especially beef.

There has, indeed, long been a reasonably broad theme representing “the” optimal diet for human health, couched within a small portfolio of other lifestyle practices diverse authorities call by different names, but prioritize in common. The planet’s many imminent perils, and unchecked population growth may, however, be narrowing down our dietary options rather rapidly. This is directly analogous to human health threats. When a person is still mostly healthy, there tend to be many ways to stay that way. The treatments for advanced disease are much more narrowly circumscribed. What happens to patients in ICUs is generally unpleasant, and highly protocolized. The planet is fast headed toward the ICU.

Fortunately, the imperatives of lifestyle for our own health promotion are highly confluent with the needs of the planet. Experts tell us, however, that the needs of the planet may be more urgent, and less accommodating. For now, we can address both by moving our diets away from processed foods, soda, and animal foods, and toward ever more vegetables, fruits, beans, lentils, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and plain water. It may not be too long, though, before a planet of both the starving and the obese, of parched fields and rising seas, of rising temperatures and dwindling aquifers, of dying birds and bats and bees- leaves us no choice at all.

We are, alas, very late to this party. But we are an ingenious species, and along with what we fix by undoing our mistakes, I am hopeful, and even optimistic, that we will fix much more by exploiting our inclination to invent. I believe we will. But as we count on our engineers to “science” us out of this mess of our own devising, none of us should spend another day blithely propagating the problem; it’s plenty big enough already to test the limits of our ingenuity.

-fin Dr. David L. Katz;www.davidkatzmd.com; founder, True Health Initiative

Dr. David L. Katz
DAVID L. KATZ MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM, is the founding director (1998) of Yale University's Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, and current President of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He earned his BA degree from Dartmouth College (1984); his MD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1988); and his MPH from the Yale University School of Public Health (1993). He completed sequential residency training in Internal Medicine, and Preventive Medicine/Public Health. He is a two-time diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, and a board-certified specialist in Preventive Medicine/Public Health. He has received two Honorary Doctorates. Dr. Katz has published roughly 200 scientific articles and textbook chapters, and 15 books to date, including multiple editions of leading textbooks in both Preventive Medicine, and nutrition. Recognized globally for expertise in nutrition, weight management and the prevention of chronic disease, he has a social media following of well over half a million. In 2015, Dr. Katz established the True Health Initiative to help convert what we know about lifestyle as medicine into what we do about it, in the service of adding years to lives and life to years around the globe.
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