Willett what should we eat

We need to look below the surface. Certainly moving toward a less animal-based diet is a good direction to go. But we can have a sustainable planet without everybody becoming a vegan. WILLETT: There are no serious conflicts in that, very broadly, the healthiest diet for humans will be a diet that is healthy for the planet. But there is this divergence in that you can have a diet that is relatively healthy for the planet, but very bad for humans.

We often call that a poverty diet in that the cheapest sources of calories are starch and sugar. We now see that the development of diseases like cancer occurs over many decades. Certain fats were highly recommended throughout, staring down the low-fat fad of the time with scientific evidence.

Today, the NHS stands as one of the most comprehensive health studies ever conducted. The findings of its third phase, specially focused on the later-life effects of adolescent diet and dietary links to breast cancer, are still to come.

Here, he tells Landscape News about his career — and its inadvertent controversies, which continue to make the world healthier for all. In the early stages of your career, little research had yet been done about the links between diet and disease. What made you curious to start researching this topic? One of the reasons that little research had been done was that many leaders in nutrition thought they knew the answers e. I wanted to learn what caused these conditions and how to prevent them.

For this reason, I went back to school to get a degree in epidemiology and then connected this with nutrition. You spent time living in Tanzania during medical school. What did that experience teach you about diet and food systems? My work in Tanzania impressed me with the powerful effect of our environment on health and disease.

Mainly, I was dealing with issues of poor sanitation and environmentally-related diseases like malaria. Coronary heart disease, on the other hand, was almost nonexistent. The NHS rose you to academic fame. How did you develop the design of the questionnaires used in that study, which you still use in various forms today? Before going to Tanzania, I used a simple food frequency questionnaire while in medical school to conduct a survey in the Potawatomi Native American community in the upper peninsula of Michigan.

I was impressed that we could gather much information that way. In my doctoral degree program at Harvard, I worked on an analysis of smoking and heart disease in the NHS and realized that this could be an ideal population in which we could collect dietary data, because the participants were already being followed for incidence of cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

Through a series of pilot studies, I identified about 60 foods that were the major contributors to intake of the key nutrients in which we were interested, and then administered the questionnaire to the , women in the main study. By using optical scanning methods [to input data via scanning systems], we were able to double the size of the questionnaire and continue updating it to align with food supply and diet trends every four years.

Most importantly, we have conducted a series of validation studies comparing our standardized questionnaires with detailed weighed diet records and biomarkers and have documented sufficient validity to provide informative data on diet and long-term health.

Do you have any personal pet peeves that people believe about nutrition? Since the internet makes a lot of ideas more easily spreadable, I wonder if there are any that you think are particularly harmful or that you wish people would disabuse themselves of. Well, quite a bit. When people were told that all fat is bad, and that we should eat more carbohydrates — that was absolutely wrong.

And that was coming from a lot of senior nutrition people. We were on the limb, I would say. Mainstream nutrition was wrong. But I think now probably this idea that refined vegetable oils, like canola oil and corn oil, are dangerous — and that omega-6 fatty acids are dangerous — IS really dangerous. We see that higher consumption of these vegetable oils is related very clearly to better cholesterol levels and lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

I know that many plant oils are high in omega-6s but low in omega-3s, or have no omega-3s. If you have only sunflower oil, or only safflower oil, for instance, which contain no omega-3s — and if you have no other sources of omega-3s in your diet — then you would be unbalanced.

And that would reduce heart disease risk. Do you have a favorite meal, or a favorite food that you like to eat? I think that if I had to say something, nuts and berries are my go-tos. Me too! And nuts come in such a variety, and you can eat them in lots of different ways — putting them on salads, having them as a snack, adding them to lots of different things. Nuts are an especially good replacement for meat and carbohydrates, too. Do you eat a lot of beans?

Personally, I eat more nuts and fewer beans. From a health standpoint, nuts have been better studied. And the evidence is much more abundant. But even putting a modest amount of beans into diets, almost everybody can tolerate that. And it adds some more variety and health along the way. And the planet could withstand producing many, many more nuts, in case everybody switched to a nut-eating diet?

We could produce a lot more, it looks like, yes. We did run the analyses for the amounts that we recommend, and the planet — it can do very well.

I think it would mean quite a big increase in nut production — which includes peanuts, by the way. When you get down to exact places and conditions for growing nuts, those numbers need to be looked at carefully. But the basic answer is yes. The planet can handle that kind of nuts. And then I just have one more small question. I personally still eat two eggs a day, although I know the Planetary Health Diet suggests one or two a week is more optimal.

While being a vegan is an option, our diet can also be good for planetary and human health if we chose to include small to modest amounts of dairy, fish, and poultry and occasionally red meat.

Some have suggested that a healthy, sustainable diet is more expensive, but we have seen that it can actually cost less because animal-sourced food are relatively expensive. Our planet is currently on a path to disaster because of climate change and other environmental impacts of our current activities. In general, earth-friendly foods are also healthy foods, but there are exceptions because grains and sugar have relatively low greenhouse gas impacts. Thus, foods made with refined starch and sugar are cheap with modest environmental impacts but very unhealthy.

This is clearly not acceptable. The direct connections are not so clear. However, COVID has exposed the terrible state of nutrition in America; most of the factors that increase the risk of dying, including obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, are largely due to poor quality diets that are also having a devastating effect on the environment. We desperately need to shift to diets that are healthy and sustainable rather than the largely animal-based, overly processed foods that we are eating.

We are obviously coming up to a critical election, and we must do everything possible to elect leaders who commit to putting the brakes on climate change and environmental degradation more broadly. Willett: I want to be able to pass on to our children and grandchildren a world that is healthy and just. We know there is a path to achieving this, but it will require all the efforts that we can muster.

That's it for today.