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The “Planetary Health Diet” is presented as a global solution that balances health and sustainability. However, when confronted with reality, the model reveals several weaknesses. Between its complexity for consumers and the economic, ecological, and social constraints it faces, the gap between theory and real-world feasibility cannot be ignored. 

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Key Messages

• The Planetary Health Diet: an ambitious but impractical model. Designed to align human health with environmental sustainability, it ultimately proves too complex and too far removed from everyday consumer reality.
• Access and affordability remain key constraints: the proposed dietary choices are not always economically sustainable or realistic on a global scale.
• Environmental paradox: strict adherence to the diet could increase pressure on land and forests, calling its own sustainability goals into question.

Planetary Health Diet: What is it?

Developed by the EAT–Lancet Commission, the Planetary Health Diet is a dietary model aimed at ensuring so-called “healthy” diets without exceeding planetary boundaries, with estimates suggesting it could prevent up to 40,000 deaths per day and halve food system – related emissions.

Review the full set of critiques of the Planetary Health Diet presented in iFood: How to Overcome Food Ideology (Italian edition).

Its success depends on a profound shift in dietary habits, particularly the ability to prioritise plant-based proteins over animal-based ones.

The model provides precise quantitative guidelines and calls on individuals and systems to adopt diets that are healthy, accessible, and sustainable. However, a significant gap remains between theoretical prescriptions and everyday practice.

Reality Check: What doesn’t Add Up in the Planetary Health Diet?

The Planetary Health Diet requires a high level of numerical and nutritional calculation from consumers, involving detailed tracking of food quantities and categories that few can apply accurately.

For example, a vegetable portion of 200–600 grams is standardized to 78 calories, overlooking large energy differences between foods such as pumpkin and spinach. Similarly, averaging across food groups produces impractical recommendations, such as 13 grams of eggs, or roughly one quarter of an egg per day.

While the model includes some flexibility, its overall structure remains complex and cognitively demanding.

Economic Accessibility and Real-World Sustainability

Beyond complexity, another key issue emerges: cost. Foods considered “healthier” are often also the least economically accessible. Seemingly marginal choices, such as using olive oil instead of rapeseed oil, can significantly affect household budgets.

This raises concrete questions about the diet’s global applicability, particularly in low-income contexts.

The Paradox of Vegetable Oils and Land Use

The Planetary Health Diet faces major ecological trade-offs. It prioritises unsaturated fat sources such as olive oil, nuts, and avocados, without fully accounting for differences in agricultural yields – many of which require large land areas and high water inputs while remaining relatively low-yielding.

If the global population adopted its recommended fat intake, by 2050 around 317 million hectares of land would be needed to meet a 74% increase in vegetable oil demand – an increase of 68% compared to current consumption patterns – with up to 120 million hectares at risk of deforestation.

The impact would be even greater if demand were met exclusively with “healthier” unsaturated fats (such as rapeseed, soybean, and sunflower oils), excluding  saturated sources like palm oil: land use would rise to around 385 million hectares, including 148 million hectares of forest. The key reason is simple – oil palm is significantly more land-efficient than other oil crops.

The paradox is clear: a diet designed to protect the planet could, if applied rigidly, place even greater pressure on ecosystems.

A Matter of Cultural and Economic Access

These issues are compounded by a social dimension. In rural Indonesia, palm oil is not an ideological choice but an economic necessity: it is affordable and locally produced. Suggesting that local communities replace it with olive oil – up to 25 times more expensive – is not a nutritional recommendation, but a theoretical exercise detached from reality.

Beyond Food Ideology: Bringing the Pleasure of Eating back to the Center of the Debate

The Planetary Health Diet is, without doubt, a robust theoretical model. However, people do not eat models – they eat real meals.

To be truly effective at a global scale, a diet must go beyond theoretical precision and account for essential factors such as economic accessibility, cultural habits, and production constraints.

Ultimately, food should not be a problem to solve, but an experience to share and enjoy.