Food for thought: eating our way to a sustainable future | Wellcome

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Professor Pete Scarbor, Alicia Wayright, LEAP
2. 10:00 – 15:00: Warwick
3. 25:00 – 30:00: Eat Lancet, Shakuntila Tilstead, Solomon Islands
4. 30:00 – 35:00: Eat Lancet, Shakuntila Tilstead

Notable quotes from "Food for thought: eating our way to a sustainable future | Wellcome"

• Welcome to When Science Finds a Way, a podcast about the science changing the world. I'm Alicia Wayright, and this is where you'll hear stories of hope from people on the front…

  about Alicia Wayright · at 0:14

• Professor Pete Scarbor is a professor of population health and leads a sustainable healthy food group at the University of Oxford in the UK. He's an expert at modeling how changes to diet can affect population health,.

  about Professor Pete Scarbor · at 1:30

• Where's the where's the complimentarities? Where's the trade-offs? And we did that by doing a lot of work with joining data sets together so that we could look at both…

  about UK · at 6:05

• Okay so one of the trials that's taking place as part of this latest work is called sustained. It's led by Ty Van Rens at the University of Warick and is exploring how people might be nudged to.

  about Warwick · at 13:12

• Of them is the eat lancet planetary health diet which I know some of your team worked on. But how realistic is it to take the conclusions of a research project based in the UK and apply it globally?

  about Eat Lancet · at 26:01

• At CGI, which is a global food research partnership. Shakuntila is a nutrition scientist who specializes in aquatic food systems and the role they can play in food security and nutrition. She's worked in countries including.

  about CGI · at 27:55

• Shakuntila is actually co-chair of the eat lancet 2.0 commission which is working on an updated version of the eat lancet report and planetary health diet for 2025. She had some interesting.

  about Shakuntila Tilstead · at 31:01

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Professor Pete Scarbor — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions · first at 1:30
  Primary interviewee explaining research on sustainable diets, the LEAP project, and policy/behavior-change interventions to reduce environmental impacts of food systems.
• Alicia Wayright — Person · Host · 2 mentions · first at 0:14
  Introduces the episode, frames the climate/food-system problem, and interviews Prof. Scarbor to translate research into listener-relevant takeaways.
• Shakuntila Tilstead — Person · Referenced expert / featured guest voice · 2 mentions · first at 27:48
  Provides a global nutrition and food-security perspective, emphasizing context-specific dietary guidance and highlighting school feeding and cultural dimensions of sustainable diets.

Books & papers

• LEAP — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:50
  Research project focusing on the impact of meat and dairy consumption on health and environment.
  Can affect population health, sustainability, and economics. He put these skills to use as a lead investigator for a recent research project called LEAP. LEAP stands for…
• Eat Lancet — Book · Referenced work · 4 mentions · first at 26:01
  Global framework for a healthy and sustainable diet, mentioned in the context of dietary recommendations.

Companies & orgs

• CGI — Company · Business focus · 3 mentions
  Global food research partnership where Shakuntila Tilstead is the director.
• Warwick — Company · Business focus · 1 mention · first at 13:16
  University where the sustained trial is led by Ty Van Rens.

Places & events

• UK — Place · Setting · 4 mentions
  Country where the University of Oxford is located and where much of the research discussed is based.
• Solomon Islands — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at 28:13
  Country where Shakuntila Tilstead has worked, mentioned in the context of food security.
  Food systems and the role they can play in food security and nutrition. She's worked in countries including Bangladesh Nepal Cambodia Sierra Leon, Zambia, Malawi, and the…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 It's not just about saying we want everyone to turn vegan. Okay? Just actually by small changes by just reducing the amount of meat and dairy that are consumed, you can actually have really big effect on the overall environmental footprint of the diet. Welcome to When Science Finds a Way, a podcast about the science changing the world. I'm Alicia Wayright, and this is where you'll hear stories of hope from people on the front line of our biggest health challenges. challenges like climate change and the food system. As we've heard on this podcast before, food production is a huge contributor to global warming. Around 25 to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the growing transporting processing and packaging of what we eat. It's even higher if you include what happens after it leaves the shop, like how we cook it and how food waste is dealt with. So, how can we make sure that the food we

0:56 eat is not only healthy, but also sustainable? It's a complicated question, especially when we all have such varied diets with different food grown in different places and produced in different ways around the world. My guest today is trying to help us figure some of this out. What we want to do is we're trying to try and find some policies that the public would support, that policy makers would support, and crucially that the food industry, the people who are delivering most of the food that that we consume would support, could get behind and actually implement, but crucially as well that would actually have an effect.

1:30 Professor Pete Scarbor is a professor of population health and leads a sustainable healthy food group at the University of Oxford in the UK. He's an expert at modeling how changes to diet can affect population health, sustainability, and economics. He put these skills to use as a lead investigator for a recent research project called LEAP. LEAP stands for livestock, environment, and people. It focused on the impact of meat and dairy consumption, and it's one of the things we'll be discussing today. So, Pete, welcome to When Science Finds Away.

2:05 Delighted to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me. So, let's start with a really softball question. Why does what we eat matter?

2:15 Well, in terms of sustainability, it's really, really important. As you mentioned, it's at least a quarter of the global greenhouse gas emissions is coming from food. And of course, remember that that's not the only impact on the environment that food is having. It's the biggest contributor to biodiversity loss on the planet. It also causes things like water scarcity, utrification, which is water pollution effectively. And all of these problems are really related not only to kind of production of the food that we eat, but also the types of foods that we're producing because different foods have got very different impacts. So changing the kind of food that we eat can have an impact on its overall environmental impact,

2:52 right? And when it comes to food, what has the biggest impact on the environment? I mean, meat and dairy seem like obvious villains, but how true is that assumption?

3:02 Oh, it's definitely the case. I'm afraid that the meat and dairy are definitely the the standout uh pieces of um of of lowest sustainability uh in in in the in the food world. Methane is a greenhouse gas. It is about 30 times as potent as carbon dioxide and cows and sheep produce a lot of it. Okay, it's they burn it out. But really the the main reason why animal source foods are much uh less sustainable than um than plant-based foods is because of inefficiencies. a hell of a lot of the food that we grow on the planet is just used for animal feed. Now, whenever you're growing any types of food, it's having an impact on um on the planet.

3:41 And if you're doing that, but then the food that you're producing, you're indirectly feeding to animals, which then only a small proportion of those calories you're growing end up as human food, you're building loads of inefficiencies. And that's why the meat production and dairy production is so much uh worse for the planet than than plant-based production. So what does the global picture look like? Are there some countries or regions where our diet is contributing to climate change more than others?

4:08 Oh, without a doubt, um, a western diet, high-income country diets are are the diets which are having the biggest impact globally. But we need to be absolutely clear about what we're talking about here. We're talking about consumption rather than production because of course the foods that we eat might be produced in lots of different regions around the world. So really what we're looking at is what are the overall environmental impact of the foods we as a population consume rather than produce. The countries that have higher consumption of animal based foods, higher consumption of meat have got the higher environmental footprint, they're all western high-income countries. And what we're seeing is in countries that are are going through economic development, we're seeing a a shift towards more western diets. So we're seeing a big increase in the meat and dairy that's being consumed in those

4:54 countries. I don't want to suggest in the slightest that in countries that are moving towards more western diets that they somehow shoulder more of the blame for the the high environmental impact of the food system. They don't. They're currently eating much much lower meat and dairy than is is is consumed in high income western countries. But that trajectory of increase there means that we're going to be running out of space very soon. If we continue on a kind of just business as usual, we continue with these trends going forward. We're going to need more land. Um and that means less forest and that means more environmental impact.

5:24 So in terms of sustainability I and maybe other people sometimes get confused with what we should be eating. Is this where LEAP comes in?

5:34 Yeah. So the whole point of LEAP project is the the title livestock, environment and people. So what we wanted to look at was particularly have a focus on livestock. So production of animal products uh both meat and dairy. But we wanted to look at its impact both on health and on the environment simultaneously. And we really wanted to try and tackle this by looking at diets. So what people are actually consuming and farming. So actually what what people are producing. What we really wanted to do was kind of really test the idea is a sustainable diet also a healthy diet and vice versa. Where's where's the where's the complimentarities? Where's the trade-offs? And we did that by doing a lot of work with joining data sets together so that we could look at both environment and health simultaneously and doing modeling projects where we basically model different global scenarios saying okay well if this is

6:20 the food that's being produced in different regions of the world if this is the food that's being consumed then what's the health impact and what's also the environmental impact of those different diets. So we're really looking at that to try and see really if we if there is a focus on meat and dairy are we going to see co- benefits here? Are we going to see a reduction in environmental impact and a an advantage in terms of health for populations as well?

6:43 Okay. So, as you mentioned, one key aspect of LEAP was modeling the environmental impact of particular diets. Can you talk me through that aspect and the data set you built?

6:53 The first thing we did was was we tried to do some global scenarios because obviously what we're looking at here with with the food system, it's important at a global level. We need to be finding solutions to keep us within global environmental kind of boundaries if you like.

7:07 So the bit that we bought for the picture in our particular group was about health modeling. So we we had a health model that was built that basically says if the if a population is eating different foods then what would be the health impact in terms of cardiovascular diseases, cancers and other diet related diseases. But the other thing that we did was link up a lot of data sets so we can look in very clear detail at one particular country in the UK and that was looking at the environmental impact of specific foods.

7:34 Now here there's loads and loads of data and there's been loads of rich data out there for for a good long time around the environmental impact of food as it's grown on farms. But of course when we go to the supermarket, we don't see the food that's grown on farms. You don't see wheat and barley and and and you know whole pigs or what have you. We've got foods that that are combination of these things. We see pizzas, we see lasagnas, we see ice cream and all of these multi-ingredient foods. And there's never really been a strong um comparable system that can link up that data on um the environmental impact of the food as it's produced at the farm that takes you through to saying this is the environmental impact of this specific product that we see on the supermarket shelf. So we built this uh algorithm that allowed us to do this by linking up to all of that good rich onfarmm data and it mapped up each of

8:23 the ingredients on the food to specific food items you know farm commodities if you like and in the end this algorithm then if you just link it up you can then start saying this is the overall environmental footprint of this specific food item. So, we did that and we published a paper back in 2022 that allows us to produce estimates for 57,000 different foods that are available in the UK and Ireland. And the approach can basically be used for anything that's got an ingredients list on the back of it. So, it can be extended out further than that. And then that's a really powerful data set.

8:53 So, what did your modeling show you about the impact our dietary choices are having or could have?

9:00 The lower amounts of meat and dairy in your diet, the the lower your environmental footprint. basically related with that diet. So the vegans for example had had a footprint that was far far lower than the meateers in our study. Uh but even if you just reduce your meat consumption by a small amount, you got really substantial reductions. So if you move from a high meat eatating diet in our study, and that was uh meat eaters that ate about more than 100 grams of meat per day, the high meat eaters were roughly a kind of average meat consumer uh from the UK. If you went down to a low meat diet, so that was reducing your meat consumption to less than 50 grams per day, then you reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from your diet by about 30%. So you can get a really massive reduction just by a small change in your diet. And that's the real crucial bit that is like emerges from research that's done like this. It's not

9:48 a kind of black and white picture. It's not just about saying we want everyone to turn vegan. Okay? just actually by small changes by just reducing the amount of meat and dairy that are consumed you can actually have really big effect on the overall environmental footprint of the diet and we know as well it's going to be good for us as well. We know that's going to be healthy because we know that these these reduced meat diets as well uh are better for health. Okay, we've seen that from the epidemiological data. We've seen for example spec specifically with red meat and processed meat that they're related with dietary risks uh particularly colorectile cancer uh increased risk of of those diseases and all of the uh diets that we saw that had reduced meat and dairy in them also had increased amounts of fruit and vegetable consumption and fruit and vegetables are really really good for our diet. So

10:34 they're moving people towards healthier diets if we're shifting people away from from meat and dairy. That's really interesting that eating less meat generally leads to a diet that's better for our health. I think there's often this concern that you might be missing out on protein, but you can get this from plant sources. And I know research has shown that most of us here in the US are eating about 20% more protein than we need anyway. Okay. So, you've built this amazing data set. Where do you go from here? How do you actually change what people are choosing to eat or or buy?

11:10 Well, that is the uh 64 million pound question and that's what we're looking at uh trying to do right at the moment. So, I think we've gone in in this field of research, we kind of got to the point where it's really kind of really established that we know what a healthy sustainable diet is. We know what it should look like. We know what we should be aiming for. The question is how do you get people to actually do it? How do you get people to to move in that direction? And that's where all the research is moving to now. So, so since we finished the LEAP project, we've we started up a few different projects. One called Salient, one called Shift, one called Thriving. And if I told you what these acronyms stood for, you wouldn't believe me because they're so contrived.

11:44 So, uh, so I won't go into detail about what they mean, but they all have a kind of common theme to them, and they're all about trying to discover policies and interventions that help move people towards more sustainable diets. What we want to do is we're trying to try and find some policies that the public would support, that policy makers would support, and crucially that the food industry, the people who are delivering most of the food that that we consume would support, could get behind and actually implement, but crucially as well that would actually have an effect.

12:14 So here what we're doing is we got a whole range of research that's built around first of all co-designing policies and interventions. That means working with the public, working with policy makers, working with the food industry to say, tell us what you think would be a useful activity, a useful intervention or a policy that could help you achieve low meat, healthier, more sustainable diets. But then crucially going and doing field trials of those. So there we then take those those interventions, those policies and we try them out in settings where people are actually making food choices. And then we try and do that in as a robust a study as possible. So wherever possible we try and do a randomized trial. So an experimental study of saying we introduced this intervention or this policy what impact did it have and we try and measure and see what's successful and then when we can discover

13:01 what's successful we can take that back to the policy makers and say here you go here's your suite of interventions here's your policies this is what you should be basing it on because this is what you can do to make real change in this area.

13:12 Okay so one of the trials that's taking place as part of this latest work is called sustained. It's led by Ty Van Rens at the University of Warick and is exploring how people might be nudged to change their behavior when shopping for food online through a plug-in that links to a website of a major UK supermarket. When customers shop online, they're given eco- ratings for their food. Basically, a traffic light system from green to red that reflects the environmental impact. They're also offered more eco-friendly alternatives when they check out, sometimes at a discounted price. We spoke to Joe, who's taken part in the trial. She lives in the north of England with her husband and two kids and is responsible for their weekly food shopping. She showed us how the plug-in worked and the impact it had on her shopping habits.

14:04 This is the website where I do my shopping. Let's type um chicken. Um as you can see here, um we've got the traffic lights. When you click on checkout, it then offers you a substitution. I really like the eco ratings because even if I only go for a product that's like one better than I would have gone for, it still feels like I am doing something here. And you know, it might only be a teeny tiny difference that I'm making, but I am making a change. I found that most meat is quite low in terms of sustainability, which I hadn't necessarily been prepared for. I think I thought that some would be really low and some would be really high whereas actually most of what I was searching for seemed to be quite low. I will try and factor in one meal a week that is meat free but that hasn't always been a welcome decision from my family shall we say. So seeing so clearly on the screen when I'm buying those ingredients

15:10 they're all green and when I'm buying the meat it's all red. You know, that's just a really clear indicator to me that we need to be doing having more of those type of meals. There was one occasion where I did accept a swap. I think on that occasion, I thought the cost was not significantly more than the item that I had chosen. The meal that I had planned wouldn't have been adversely affected by this swap and it was being presented to me as a more sustainable option. So it felt like well if I can do it why not give it a go. The sustainability side of things I would say it was something that I was aware of something that I was conscious about but often felt and still do to an extent feel slightly overwhelmed by knowing where to start with it all and feeling like there's there's not very much I could do personally to make a difference and then weighing that up with other factors like the cost and will my

16:07 children eat this food. It it did and still does to a little extent feel a little bit overwhelming. I think like you want to to shop well and conscientiously, but there are other factors at play and to to change that and to consciously think about making changes is is more to think about and more um work essentially. So I do find making those changes tricky, but small things like the traffic lights and the substitutions can help towards that, can't they? I've kept the plug-in um on on my browser so that I can still see those traffic lights each week when I'm shopping. And so yeah, I will continue to use that and you know be guided by the traffic lights and recommendations along the way. I too can relate to Joe's uh sense of overwhelm and I'm glad that she found uh the plug-in to be very helpful to her after the study. But Pete, tell me a bit more about how these eco ratings are calculated and what

17:10 they're telling Joe about her shopping. So they're they're using similar sort of uh data that that I described earlier around how we link up the environmental footprint of foods to the actual product that is available on the store shelf there. It's taken an extra layer to that by then looking at the environmental footprint and then saying right, okay, rather than just presenting the total amount there, we're going to combine lots of different uh um variables. So greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity impact, water use, lots of different environmental impacts, combining them into one index and then presenting them as you say as as a kind of colorcoded uh uh scale for for people to follow. This is not dissimilar to to what's done in lots and lots of places around the healthiness of food. So if you go around Europe, there's a commonly used uh scale called nutri score, which is a a traffic light that goes uh from A to E to

18:00 basically just give a pictorial representation about the healthiness of food. Same thing being going on here, but looking at environmental indicators instead of nutrition

18:09 and why are the swaps and the discounts also important? I think Joe's point there about it being really, really complicated. We cannot ignore that at all. Okay, you give people more information like labeling and that you're throwing it into a really crowded, really difficult marketplace in order that you know to try and grab people's attention and try and make the their the decision- making. So that's one more thing to think about. You're thinking about what are we going to get to feed the kids? Is it going to be tasty? Is it within my budget? And now you're thinking about sustainability as well. So it's good that we've got those eco labels because if you've got eco labels, as I said earlier, you're flooding the system with data, right?

18:45 And they could be really, really helpful in that regard. But let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to get anywhere with eco labels alone because it's such a congested marketplace. So, we need to do something more. We need to make the more healthy, more sustainable choice the easy choice to make. Now, the swaps that we're doing in that particular study and their price discounts, that's one particular way of doing it. So, it's making sure with the swaps that uh it's very prominent when people are making their decisions around saying, "Oh, here's something else that might work for you." With the price discount, that's more obvious because it's about saying, "Okay, we can make it cheaper." that's a better choice for you.

19:18 So sustained just looked at environmental impact data. How do you then build in the health aspect

19:26 in terms of the uh health outcome? We're going back onto our health models that I kind of introduced and and discussed in the first place back in the leap project. So all we can do in these little experimental studies is just say well what's the short-term impact? So people changed their diet. So what what did it look like for salt levels? What did it look like for sugar levels? Etc. etc. But we got these health models because we know how salt and sugar and fruits and vegetables and processed meat, we know how that impacts your health over a long term. So we can put those into those health models in order to translate those results from those trials into what's going to happen over a long term if it was adopted at scale.

20:00 What impact are you hoping to have with these behavior change trials? And is it just about influencing customers or are there bigger policy change ambitions? Personally, uh I wouldn't be doing this research if I didn't think that it could have policy impacts long term. I think that has to be the goal is to try and produce evidence which is going to influence policy. What's really really important is that you don't create inequalities or you don't I mean we already have inequalities in the food system, big big inequalities, and you don't make those worse. Fortunately, one of the ways to kind of make sure that you're trying to address inequalities and reduce inequalities is to be working on policies that are more upstream. And by that by I I mean that work on changing the the uh the environments which influence how we make food decisions. If we're changing the way a supermarket looks, operates, promotes

20:50 its foods and all of this, then it's going to be affecting everyone in the supermarket equally. If we're doing stuff that relies on the individual to take a lot of agency and make their own decisions such as providing eco lababeling for example on foods, then you've got a problem because then that can actually exacerbate inequalities because only some people in the in the uh population are actually going to react to those differences and those changes.

21:12 And what role do government policies play in shaping sustainable diets? And are there any initiatives you find particularly promising? I always think there's like two good examples that I usually go for. One is one is smoking, right? Because because smoking is an example where we built up lots and lots of evidence to demonstrate that clearly smoking is bad for your health. Forced kind of governments to act and start restricting the availability of these cigarettes. And basically what they did was they threw the kitchen sink at it.

21:41 So they did everything. So they make them more expensive. They make the packaging horrible. They make them not able to promote themselves on TV. They take them off of sports gambling and advertising. And that shows you that the that the policy tools that we've got available can really make a difference because you see this big fall away in smoking statistics over time in countries that have implemented all of these policies. So that's telling us if you do joined up policy action in an area, you can really change the dial.

22:04 The other thing that I use as a as an example is whole milk consumption. So whole milk consumption in the UK was going along absolutely fine, really nice and steady until about the late '7s, early 80s. But again, it fell away really, really quickly. And the reason we're there was because there was a new disruptor in the marketplace which was skimmed milk. Yeah. Right. All of a sudden skimmed milk comes to the marketplace. Oh, we'll have that. That's going to be better for us. Got le fat less fat in it. So overall, I mean, I'm not saying that that was sustainability wise that that this was was a big deal.

22:33 But what I am saying is you could see this this big change because a disruptor uh came into the marketplace. Now the crucial thing is we've got that for sustainability. We've got these plant-based alternatives, okay? Right. that are basically disrupting the marketplace and saying, "Hey, you know, these chicken nuggets, why not just try some some soy protein nuggets or some some some uh vegan uh nuggets?" Uh um uh instead, they've got a much lower footprint and they could potentially just do do a really easy kind of replace. Now, at the moment, governments aren't getting behind these products at all. Right. If anything, they're getting in the way. So, we've got like sort of um legislation in the UK where we're not allowed to call soy milk soy milk. Okay?

23:10 Has to be called soy drink. Okay? And it's like It's it's ridiculous. Yeah. Right. And it's like you were not allowed to call soy yogurt soya yogurt. It has to be called soya fermented pudding or something something similar. Right.

23:22 Okay. This is actively kind of legislation which is in the way to to prevent the kind of marketing of these very products that we're going to have to get behind because they're going to be a tool that is going to help us achieve this transition towards more sustainable diets. Uh and at the moment the legislation is actually preventing them. So it's not even that they're being promoted, they're actually being hindered by current legislation. So yeah, there is there is lots of things that policy could do in that area.

23:51 And can you tell me about your latest research looking into ultrarocessed foods?

23:56 Yeah, sure. So ultrarocessed foods of course are really hot topic of debate in the in the health world at the moment with lots and lots of research coming on that that this class ultrarocessed foods which really it's a convoluted definition but broadly speaking sometimes it's described as foods that you couldn't make in your own kitchen. Okay. Yeah. Right. That's sometimes used to kind of shorthand for it. So what we're interested in is what is the environmental impact of these these ultrarocessed foods. And the reason why we're interested in that is because a lot of those ultrarocessed foods are your plant-based alternatives that we've discussed. So your veggie sausages, your vegan nuggets, your soy milk. Soyer milk gets counted in that in that. So what we're doing is we're doing a bit of work which basically says we got a sample of people. Let's split them into groups by the amount of ultrarocessed foods that

24:42 they consume and then we'll just look at what is the environmental impact of the diets of those different groups. And what we're interested to see is if it comes out that the people that are eating a lot of ultrarocessed foods, if they've got worse environmental impacts, um then we'll say, okay, well, the health and the the sustainability goals here for ultrarocessed foods are in synergy and actually maybe they should be something that we should be legislating for or it should be helping policy. But if it goes against it, if we see that the people who are eating a lot of ultrarocessed foods are also the people who've got the lower environmental impact, and I should say I have not seen the results yet, but I think it's entirely possible that that's what will get revealed because basically vegans and vegetarians are more likely to be eating a lot of ultrarocessed foods. We've seen that in other research

25:26 where vegans and vegetarians eat more ultrarocessed foods than the than meat eatating population. If that is the case, then we got a problem. Because then if we're pushing policies that is trying to get people to eat less ultrarocessed foods, then we could be accidentally a byproduct of that could be that we could increase the environmental impact of of our food system rather than decreasing it. And we really need holistic policies right now that are moving us towards more healthy and more sustainable diets.

25:52 So thinking about this more globally, there are examples of projects that have attempted to create a global framework for a healthy and sustainable diet. One of them is the eat lancet planetary health diet which I know some of your team worked on. But how realistic is it to take the conclusions of a research project based in the UK and apply it globally?

26:14 Yeah, that's a that's a common criticism of the eat lancet diet and uh and and you know I I will say not without um some grounds whenever you're talking about diet obviously diet changes so massively not only around the world not only between populations but within populations. Yeah, you look at any population, people are eating loads and loads of different things. So, how realistic is it to be able to just say here's one diet and this is what we expect kind of the global population should be consuming. If you look at that kind of paper and the way that was produced, it is not saying that this is the diet that we think that everyone should be consuming and it's just very well predefined. It's basically putting guidelines for roughly how much you should be consuming in your diet at a population level as well, not even at an individual level based around how much globally meat we should be producing,

27:00 how much fruit and vegetables we should be producing, how many cereals, but then for each individual, it's completely kind of up to to you or or each different population around what that would look like in practice. So it's it's a broad guideline and actually if you look at that it's not dissimilar in that way to WHO guidelines about what a healthy diet is where they put broad guidelines in around things like saying how much protein should be in your diet, how much carbohydrates, how much how much fat saturated fat, how much fruit and vegetables should be in the diet and all of those kind of things. Those who guidelines on on public health have have never kind of been seen as being controversial. They're broad guidelines that you can then interpret within your own populations and your own kind of way of of how you actually achieve those.

27:43 And I think you need to look at the eat lancet diet in a similar way. Well, to get an international perspective on this, we spoke to Shakuntila Tilstead. She's the director of nutrition, health, and food security at CGI, which is a global food research partnership. Shakuntila is a nutrition scientist who specializes in aquatic food systems and the role they can play in food security and nutrition. She's worked in countries including Bangladesh Nepal Cambodia Sierra Leon, Zambia, Malawi, and the Solomon Islands and talked to us about the challenges of taking western dietary recommendations and applying them in other contexts.

28:25 Especially when I work in rural areas in Africa or Asia, the aspirations of parents is to have a strong and a smart child and the relationship between strength and and being smart is very much related to the foods it which you eat. So the aspirations can be for a poor mother is to ensure for example that her child eats an egg a few times a week or get some meat a few times a week and that's very different from when we talk about foods in western countries and we talk about cutting down the consumption of too much animal source foods. So the context is extremely is extremely important and the aspirations and goals and wishes of parents for their children are very different because of the context in which they live. So if you read for example about um what is considered a healthy diet in the west in western countries we talk about minimizing the amounts of animal source foods we eat. That's it's very difficult

29:41 to go to a a woman with an aspiration to to give her child an egg a few times a week and say, "Oh, no. The new science tells us we must cut down on the amount of eggs you eat per week."

29:58 Uh it feels like in certain parts of the world this message to eat less meat can be problematic. And what's your take?

30:04 Oh yeah. No, I I agree completely. I think when we're talking about um reducing the amount of animal sourced foods that's being consumed by the amount of meat and dairy, we're really talking about high income countries. That's that's where the focus is because that's where most of the problem is. That's where most of the environmental damage is coming from and that's the region where if you reduce the animal source foods at population level, you're only going to have benefits for health. This does not apply the world round.

30:30 Okay? This is this is not advice that needs to be taken up in every single country and in every single population. Okay. And actually if you look at things like the Lancet diet again even within there there are subtleties around this. It's actually very similar to what was just described in that little clip. You know a small amount eaten on a few occasions uh throughout the week. So actually I feel like in the data and and in the evidence there's there's actually not a contradiction but in the coms there really is and we need to work on that much much better.

31:01 Shakuntila is actually co-chair of the eat lancet 2.0 commission which is working on an updated version of the eat lancet report and planetary health diet for 2025. She had some interesting thoughts on what can be learned from other cultures when it comes to thinking about sustainable diets. When we in the west talk about sustainable diets, we talk about foods and variety of foods in terms of meeting nutrient needs. For example, that's a big part of diets. When you go to other countries in Asia, in Africa, or even even in South Europe, it's not just the food, it's the whole eating experience. It's how you eat, what you eat, how food is placed within the family context, and what food means.

31:55 Just not nutrients that you get from foods that you consume, but the whole system of being together with family about sharing a meal, the discussions and the conversations that happen around the table. So it's much more than foods to fill your stomach and foods to supply you with nutrients. And I think that is something we should learn from. We have the ability to make sure that we put foods and we put diets in a much richer context. Let me talk a bit about school feeding because that's really important. I've seen it in Cambodia. I've seen it in Brazil. The word that people are using now is homegrown school meals. Meaning that you take into consideration both the communities as well as the foods that are grown in the area. So so parents are engaged in preparing the the meals at the schools and also the local producers and the local products they use in school meals. So school meals can go a very long way. And remember these

33:10 are government programs. So they are huge programs. They can have a lot of influence all the way back to the foods you access, the foods you grow in society. It's not that the wimp fancy of you know of a few well-meaning people or a few rich people. They are programs that serve the whole of society. It's so interesting to hear Shikuntillaa talk about the eating experience and our relationship with food. How important do you think this aspect is?

33:49 Yeah, I mean I think it's it's fantastically important. I would just say I'm delighted that Shaken Tiller is on on the Eat Lancet 2 commission because I think she's got some great insight to kind of put to it. um the different food cultures that you see around the world in in certainly in countries where the food culture is is much stronger than we see for example in the UK or in in the US. It really can can then shape and give you a really good solid um uh platform in which to try and kind of build towards healthy and sustainable diets and and and as as Shakila mentioned it it gives you so much more than just the healthiness and the the sustainability. food is is is great because everyone understands it.

34:29 Everyone interacts with it and it's such a great tool to build those social interactions and to to build people's understanding of how they're connected really with with with everyone else in the community. So, it's a really wonderful tool to be able to do that and we need to kind of recognize that and actually if you if you're trying to kind of reduce food just to kind of one aspect like say sustainability or health then you're going to be missing the great kind of holistic appeal of food in general. Shakuntella also mentioned school feeding programs and the idea of homegrown school meals uh along with supermarkets. Could these also be a potential gateway to implementing dietary changes and influencing dietary behavior at scale?

35:10 I think they definitely can, but we need to be kind of aware of of of what this would mean in in in different contexts. And this is now I'm talking from the UK perspective. It's going to be different in different uh uh countries that have got a stronger kind of food culture. If we could get to a food culture in schools that is promoting much more holistic approach where where we're we're dedicating a good time for each meal, if we could get the idea about kind of growing food and how that food all kind of impacts across the whole system. If you can build that culture, then fantastic. I would embrace it totally. But that's a big culture change, right? And and that as a policy change is going to be hard to implement because it's it's fighting against the basic system that we have where we're trying to cram everything we possibly can into these schools. One thing I do want to say though is actually you can

35:53 look at it at schools. You can also look at it at supermarkets. You can look at it at cantens. A lot of the interventions and policies I've been discussing so far today have been based around saying okay we've got this existing system. How can we tweak it? How can we make small changes to get like maximum impact? Let's face it that as a total might be able to tweak and optimize the current system that we have. But one way of basically kind of making a big impact is to start saying well maybe we need to tackle the whole system. maybe we need to kind of chuck the whole thing out and start again. Now that scares people and people will say, well, can you actually achieve that? Is it possible to do and a lot of times you we only see the inertia. We only see it in saying, well, we do things this way.

36:33 It's the only way that we can possibly do it. But that's not the case. You know, we do do things differently. We have done things differently in the past and we can go back to doing things differently going forward. I think there's a tendency right now um in the UK and in US and in some high-income countries to basically say well okay look politics is pretty much been pushing the kind of like this particular economic model for the last what 40 years 45 years or so and so that's the only model that we've got available to us. We can only do things this way but that's not how politics works. It renews itself every now and again. You get these new dominant models that take over and when you get things like that then you can get big changes in culture as well that go alongside it. So, if we can get there, fantastic. But I think to get there, we're talking about big changes to to food systems and to cultures.

37:20 So, what's the one thing that anyone listening could do to help make our diets more sustainable?

37:28 Ah, that is a great question. Okay, fantastic. Now, I know that most people when they hear this, they will give the answer and say, "Ah, right. Change your diet. Do this one small change." I'm going to resist that. And the reason why I'm going to resist that is because I don't think that we're going to get anywhere by just encouraging people to make individual level changes. What we need to do to change the diet in in uh to such a degree that we reduce the environmental impact of the diet is to make policy change. So here's what I recommend. Get involved with policy.

37:56 Okay? Get involved with the places that are providing the food that you're consuming. Get involved with the decision making there. If that's at work, talk to the people at your work. Talk to people at your work canteen about changing that canteen so that there's more sustainable plant-based foods available for people to consume. If it's about schools, then then talk to the schools about making sure that sustainable options are available every day of the week and that they're thinking about the environmental footprint of the foods. Those community level actions, those political actions are going to be much more beneficial in general than just individuals making small changes to their diet. Hm.

38:34 If you want to make small changes to your diet as well, that's great. And we focus mainly on diets for this episode, but this is obviously part of a much bigger conversation. What do you think needs to happen globally for us to have a food system that is sustainable and healthy in the long term? So, broadly speaking, if we keep going down this route uh and we keep getting an increase in demand for meat, which is what we're seeing as the global population increases and as countries go through economic development, then we're going to be faced with three choices.

39:06 Choice one is we make more land available to produce that meat and that means cutting down a lot of rainforest. Choice two is about saying we produce the same amount of meat but in much less land space and that means big compromises with animal welfare. Or choice three is we say we let that demand rise but we don't satisfy that demand and that means prices go up massively. Okay. So somewhere there's going to be some sort of collision of those three different outcomes if we don't do something. So getting ahead of the game, getting the policies put in place which are changing our consumption behavior, changing our demand for meat is only going to be sensible in the long run if we want to avoid uh deforestation, reductions in animal welfare or big price increases for meat.

39:50 Yeah. And I assume all of these options will exacerbate the climate crisis in one way or another as well. So as you say, getting ahead of the game now to change consumption feels really pressing. My final question is after doing all this research, have you gone vegan or have you found yourself reducing the amount of meat in your diet?

40:10 Whichever answer I give to that puts me open to kind of criticism. If I come out and I say, "Yeah, yeah, I'm a vegan and that's why I'm doing all this research." Then people say, "Oh, Pete's just led by a vegan agenda. He's completely biased by his research." And if I say, "Oh, no. I'm not a vegan. No, I'm not doing that." Then people say, "Well, he's a hypocrite. He's not really going to listen to it." It's often used. it I I get this question virtually every time I do this and it's often put forward as a trap. So uh so I I sidestep those questions and I just simply say I uh you know I I like the rest of us I informed by the evidence that is in front of me and I make my decisions accordingly.

40:46 Well, I will speak on uh I'll speak on my own behalf and say that this conversation was illuminating because prior to learning more about your research, I have been curious about minimizing the meat in my diet just because I have high cholesterol. So, I'm coming at it from a health mindset, but also to learn the benefits of sustainability from it was really empowering to me. and it gave me another tool to think about how to make more mindful choices for my own personal health and also for the health of my community. So, I'm going to try and have a little bit more of a open dialogue with my friends at the dinner table, at the lunch table. And I thank you for giving me the tools and sort of being more of an objective resource rather than someone pointing out your own lifestyle and encouraging people to follow suit one way or the other. I think that's really mindful. So, I appreciate that and thank you so much,

41:40 Professor Pete, for this fantastic conversation. It's absolutely no problem. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you very much.

41:47 Thanks for watching this episode of When Science Finds a Way. Thanks also to my guest, Professor Pete Scarboro, and to Joe and Shakuntilla Tilstead for sharing their experience and perspectives. I found that conversation super interesting. I have to say I come from a culture where dinner or lunch comes with a meat protein and I'm really accustomed to eating a meal in that way. But more recently, some of my close friends have started changing their diets to include more pescatarian and plant-based options. And my doctor has recommended that I cut down on animal fats to help with my cholesterol. So the diets around me have become more health consscious and having this conversation has helped me realize how this in turn has a positive environmental impact too. It is possible to achieve both at the same time and it feels like this is a really powerful message for the public to understand better. And what better

42:52 person to talk us through this research than Pete. He certainly made me feel more empowered to change my own diet and to create broader change in my community as well. When science finds a way is brought to you by Welcome, a charitable foundation that supports the global scientific community working to build a healthier future for everyone. If you visit welcome.org/mpodcast, org/mpodcast. That's welcome with two L's. You'll find transcripts from the show and a whole host of information about the urgent health challenges Welcome is tackling. And remember to hit the subscribe button here on YouTube for more episodes of the podcast. All right, see you next time.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Food for thought: eating our way to a sustainable future | Wellcome"?

In order: 0:00 Professor Pete Scarbor, Alicia Wayright, LEAP; 10:00 Warwick; 25:00 Eat Lancet, Shakuntila Tilstead, Solomon Islands; 30:00 Eat Lancet, Shakuntila Tilstead.

What is mentioned in this Wellcome episode?

9 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Professor Pete Scarbor, Alicia Wayright, LEAP, Eat Lancet, Shakuntila Tilstead, UK. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Food for thought: eating our way to a sustainable future | Wellcome"?

The episode runs 44 min; the transcript is about 8,451 words in 76 timestamped sections.

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