The meat industry smeared the Planetary Health Diet. Now its creators are back with more evidence.

Now, the commission is back with an updated report, which strengthens the original report’s findings and adds a lot about the societal changes needed to build a sustainable food system. And seemingly in lockstep with the update, the haters’ hashtag, #Yes2Meat, is once again picking up steam. But with stronger evidence than ever for the diet and its feasibility, plus additions that address its predecessor’s shortcomings, the new report is a good reminder that building a more sustainable food system isn’t just an imperative, it’s achievable — and it scares the meat industry.

2019’s EAT-Lancet Commission report and the Planetary Health Diet

The Eat-Lancet 2019 Commission report wasn’t a typical nutrition study. It outlined a diet that would not only optimize health for people around the world, but would do so within what scientists call “planetary boundaries” — essentially limits on how much pressure human activities can exert on the planet’s different systems before it can no longer function to sustain life in the long term. Recent assessments have indicated that many of these boundaries, like those on carbon emissions, freshwater pollution, ocean acidification and habitat destruction, have already been surpassed, adding urgency to the mission to reduce our impact.

As both of the EAT-Lancet reports have laid out, the food system is largely to blame: This year’s update calculated that food systems are actually the dominant reason five of the six exceeded boundaries (out of a total of nine) have been crossed.

With this in mind, the original EAT-Lancet report set out to define a diet that would maximize human health while bringing the food system’s pressure on all nine planetary boundaries back into an acceptable range. The broad strokes might seem pretty familiar: Prioritizing whole, plant-based foods as the base of the diet while reducing dairy and minimizing meat, ultraprocessed foods and added sugars.

A not-so-grassroots backlash

Some of the backlash on the 2019 report was expected: Conventional agriculture groups reacted negatively to the recommendations about meat and dairy, portraying the report and its findings as a culturally insensitive attack on the livelihoods of traditional farmers and pastoralists around the world. There are a few issues with this position, namely that the industrialized animal agriculture system critiqued in the report is a far cry from traditional, sustainably scaled livestock operations. In fact, the report did stipulate that people in many economically underdeveloped regions of the world could benefit from eating a little more meat and dairy, and that there was room to expand small-scale livestock production in those places.

Perhaps more surprising was the reaction from a vocal handful of academics, doctors, “wellness” influencers and journalists, who raised seemingly earnest concerns from multiple directions: questioning the nutritional adequacy of a mainly plant-based diet (despite its alignment with much conventional advice), second-guessing established science about industrially raised livestock and their clear contribution to environmental degradation, pointing out the economic inaccessibility of the diet to poor people around the world and even questioning whether it was appropriate for a group of “academic elites” in the Global North to be dictating what people in the rest of the world should be eating.

In an internet landscape where contrarianism and questioning authority get a lot of attention, many of these critiques landed, positioning the report in the middle of culture wars that have long raged around meat consumption. In echo chambers dominated by climate change skepticism and conspiratorial backlash to any kind of guidance from expert bodies, the EAT-Lancet Commission became yet another shadowy entity seeking to destroy personal freedoms.

But it was the apparently nuanced, equity-focused criticisms that ultimately had more impact. Among circles of sustainability-minded experts eager to show deference to and respect for other cultural perspectives, a favorable reference to the EAT-Lancet report became a mark of cultural ignorance, this despite the reality that the commission was composed of 37 experts from around the world.

That backlash has significantly blunted the report’s impact and muddied what should have been an uncomplicated call to action. What started out as a moderate, well-supported argument for achievable dietary change — notably less demanding than the usual calls for complete vegetarianism or veganism — was branded as radical and unrealistic.

Again, the various narratives challenging the report didn’t actually bubble up organically, nor did they gather momentum on merit alone: As the Changing Markets Foundation, a nonprofit group, highlighted in a recent analysis, many of the most influential actors in discrediting the report had direct ties to the meat industry. And they weren’t just concerned individuals speaking out on their own — many of the most influential voices pushing the misinformation were part of a tight network that coordinated responses in several waves. The #Yes2Meat hashtag ultimately reached 26 million people on Twitter — a million more than were exposed to the report and accurate descriptions of its contents.

Taken all together, those shifts mean that the second EAT-Lancet report is landing in a moment of greater hostility toward and denial of the basic scientific realities that underpin it — despite the fact that all those changes should make the need for a more sustainable and resilient food system more obvious. Accordingly, the report’s new iteration more fully illustrates how the food system is exceeding planetary boundaries, presents more evidence for reducing meat and dairy intake, and promotes a planetary health diet with the same broad strokes as the first.

Its most substantial changes, however, directly respond to the criticisms of its predecessor, especially when it comes to cultural specificity, equity and feasibility of implementing the PHD. This iteration of the PHD gives many more options and examples of how diverse cultural foodways can meet the recommendations. And the EAT Forum is hard at work publishing country-by-country guides that demonstrate just how easily a kaleidoscope of culinary traditions fit within the new diet’s overall framework.

Further, the 2025 iteration plainly acknowledges that adopting a PHD would substantially reshape economies and change livelihoods. And rather than speculating how smallholder livestock farmers might suffer (a favorite criticism of the 2019 report), the authors instead model how job losses from animal agriculture would largely be offset by gains in fruit and vegetable production. Moreover, detailed projections of the PHD’s costs show that the generally lower cost of production for plant based-foods would improve food accessibility worldwide.

The “radical” diet that isn’t

Although the report offers compelling evidence of the benefits of a PHD, its authors are not sanguine that the food industry will stop its unsustainable overproduction without a fight. They recognize that building a more equitable and sustainable food system will require big shifts in the way that the food system is organized and regulated. We cannot expect to change the food we grow and eat when food systems are largely controlled by corporate interests that put profit over people. Doing so will require substantial participation from an engaged, organized public as well as governments willing to impose more transparency and regulation on international agribusinesses.

With that need for public engagement in mind, misinformation — like that spread by the meat industry in 2019 — remains a key obstacle for food system transformation. And thanks to detailed analyses of the response to the first report, that’s one threat that the EAT-Lancet Commission and its allies are prepared for this time around. Armed with the new report’s more robust evidence, plus its focus on social dimensions, science communicators and advocates are better equipped to rebut the familiar critiques. Moreover, it’s easier to discredit the seemingly earnest attacks now that they’ve been exposed for what they really are: a smear campaign. That coordinated effort was effective — but will likely be less so now that we’ve revealed the wizard behind the curtain. The PHD was never radical or unrealistic; with the new guidance on adapting it to different food cultures, it’s even more achievable. While that might be a big shift for the average American eater, it reflects the way that many people around the world actually eat.