The Lancet Published a Report on the "Planetary Health Diet"

The world's top medical journal The Lancet published on October 3, 2025, a "Planetary Health Diet" report issued by a committee of medical experts from more than 30 countries around the world. The report points out that the key to a healthy diet is "plant-based, moderate intake of animal-source foods, and minimizing added sugar, saturated fat, and salt."

This "Planetary Health Diet" report is not very different from the 2019 "Planetary Health Diet" report; most viewpoints merely reiterate the views from that time. Although the committee's "Planetary Health Diet" report has been widely controversial since its release in 2019, with the global agricultural and food industry attacking this standard most strongly, considering the report's conclusions exaggerated, unrealistic, and conflicting with local dietary habits, the experts still adhered to viewpoints roughly the same as the 2019 report after referring to the latest medical research results.

The experts summarized that the daily intake of beef, pork, and mutton should be limited to 15 g (the 2019 recommendation was 14 g), while the daily intake of vegetables, fruits, and grains should be 200 g, 300 g, and 210 g respectively; dairy products should be 250 g (yogurt is better than unfermented dairy); the intake of seafood such as fish is 30 g; and white meat such as poultry should be consumed in moderation.

The researchers emphasized that such a dietary pattern can "improve health, substantially reduce overall mortality risk, and reduce the incidence of multiple diet-related major chronic diseases." If people worldwide followed this diet, 15 million premature deaths could be avoided each year. Such a diet can also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which is helpful for improving the global climate environment.

Most of us modern people have already become accustomed to consuming too much animal-source food; high-sugar, high-salt diets are also popular, and a plant-based diet is easily questioned. Many people wonder whether such a diet can provide enough nutrition. In fact, such doubts are unnecessary. Human dietary habits currently generally feature high sugar, high salt, high fat, and high protein; this era-specific diet has led to many new epidemics, such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia, cancer, obesity, and depression. These currently most prevalent diseases are all related to unhealthy dietary habits.

Patients with chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and hypertension need to control their diet in addition to normal treatment if they want to recover. The author often advises cancer patients in the rehabilitation period to adhere to a dietary habit of "80-90% plant-based, 10-20% animal-based, light flavors, fresh ingredients, no pickled or grilled food, no smoking, no alcohol." According to the author's many years of observation, cancer patients who can adhere to this dietary habit indeed have significantly better survival time and quality of life than those who cannot.