Hello, this is Monica Reinagal, and you are listening to the nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

Thanks for tuning in today. I recently attended a conference

in Boston at which some of the world's leading nutrition experts and researchers were challenged to arrive at a

consensus about what the healthiest diet for humans is. Now when I saw the list of

attendees I knew this was going to be a spirited and very interesting

discussion.

Among the invitees were some of today's most well-known proponents of the vegan diet, for example,

including Dr. Neil Barnard, who's the founder of the Physicians Committee for

Responsible Medicine, and Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventive Medicine Research

Institute. Also on the docket, however, was Dr. Boyd Eaton. He's the author of the Paleolithic

prescription and he was one of the first to propose that our diet should mimic the diet

eaten by our hunter-gatherer ancestors,

including plenty of animal protein.

So I was very curious to see how these seemingly irreconcilable points of view could be united into a consensus.

Much to my surprise, the question of whether or not we should eat meat was not a major bone of

contention at this meeting. Although Dr Eaton still believes

that the optimal diet for humans would contain meat, he now believes that issues of sustainability

and planetary health have become even more pressing

and he concedes that eating large amounts of red meat is simply not compatible with a healthy planet.

Dr. Eden now describes himself as a paleorealist and he

advocates a diet that's high in protein but primarily from plant-based sources.

Even apart from the sustainability issue, however, Dr. Eaton disagrees with

...