Planetary Health Diet: What is it and how can it benefit our health and the environment?

Ever wondered what a truly healthy plate looks like?

The 2025 report of the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems, published this October, defines the content of healthy food intake, detailing what we should eat more of, what to cut back on, and how our food choices can help protect the planet.

The Planetary Health Diet (PHD) is a science-based global reference diet designed to support optimal health outcomes across populations and cultures.

According to the commission, the PHD represents a nutritionally adequate and plant-rich dietary framework that can be applied worldwide while allowing for cultural and regional variations.

The PHD is not a one-size-fits-all plan but a flexible dietary model that can be adapted to different dietary needs, including vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, and flexitarian, or mostly plant-based with small amounts of animal products.

At its core, the PHD promotes eating more plants and less meat, choosing healthy and unsaturated fats, minimizing added sugar and salt, while respecting cultural and traditional food practices.

According to the commission, the Planetary Health Diet provides adequate nutrition while also reducing the risk of non-communicable diseases. 

"At present, all national diets deviate substantially from the PHD, but a shift to this pattern could avert approximately 15 million deaths per year (27% of total deaths worldwide). Such a transition would reduce the rates of many specific non-communicable diseases and promote healthy longevity," the report said. 

In an audiovisual presentation by the EAT–Lancet on YouTube, experts illustrated a planetary healthy plate, which includes a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and plant-based proteins, with moderate amounts of meat, dairy, and seafood.

It also encouraged people to opt for unsaturated fats (such as olive or sunflower oil) and avoid refined grains, highly processed foods, and added sugar.

Here’s the recommended intake per person based on the EAT-Lancet Commission:

• Fruits - 200g/day
• Vegetables - 300g/day
• Whole grains - 232g/day
• Potatoes - 50g/day
• Dairy foods - 250g/day
• Legumes - 75g/day
• Nuts - 50g/day
• Beef/lamb pork - 98g/week
• Poultry - 203g/week
• Seafood - 196g/week

The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission report also highlighted how consuming more vegetables and less resource-intensive foods, such as red meat, can help reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture.

According to the report, food is now “the single largest cause of planetary boundary transgressions, driving the transgression of five of the six breached boundaries."

These include land system change, biosphere integrity, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, and an estimated 30% of greenhouse gas emissions fueling climate change. 

According to the report, PHD can help bring down agricultural emissions by 15%. 

This echoes EAT-Lancet’s earlier 2019 report, which warned that the human diet has caused “catastrophic” damage to the planet.

The commission has underscored that transforming the way food is produced and consumed plays a crucial role in addressing climate and biodiversity issues. 

"No safe solution to climate and biodiversity crises is possible without a global food systems transformation," it said.

"Even if a global energy transition away from fossil fuels occurs, food systems will cause the world to breach the Paris Climate agreement of limiting global mean surface temperature to 1.5°C," it added. 

Under the Paris Agreement, the threshold of 1.5°C is the limit of global warming that 195 signatories, including the Philippines, had vowed to try to prevent to reduce climate change risks and impacts. 

While the EAT-Lancet Commission noted that no single measure can secure a healthy, just, and sustainable food system, it emphasized that changing food systems in line with its recommendations, "which include a shift to healthy diets, improved and increased agricultural productivity, and reduced food loss and waste—would substantially reduce environmental pressures on climate, biodiversity, water, and pollution." 

—CDC, GMA Integrated News