#584: EAT-Lancet: Does the Planetary Health Diet Improve Human Health?
Sigma Nutrition Radio
Danny Lennon
4.8 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How should we think about diets that claim to optimise both human and planetary health? Can a single "reference diet" really balance the complex trade-offs between nutrition adequacy, chronic disease prevention, and environmental sustainability?
These questions have gained renewed attention with the release of the 2025 update to the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet. The original 2019 report proposed a mostly plant-based dietary pattern designed to improve population health while staying within planetary boundaries. But since then, new data have emerged—on nutrient requirements, disease risk, and environmental modelling—that complicate many of the original assumptions.
What does the updated evidence actually say about the health impacts of eating in line with this framework? How have the environmental projections changed? And what do these evolving targets mean for individuals, policymakers, and researchers trying to translate broad sustainability goals into practical dietary guidance?
These are some of the questions explored in this episode of Sigma Nutrition, which examines the 2025 EAT-Lancet update, its scientific foundations, and what it reveals about the intersection of nutrition, health, and planetary sustainability.
Timestamps
- [01:46] Focus on the 2025 EAT-Lancet report
- [02:27] Overview of the Planetary Health Diet
- [03:13] Comparing 2019 and 2025 reports
- [03:40] Dietary recommendations and nutrient targets
- [04:14] Health and environmental impacts
- [09:12] Scoring methods and dietary patterns
- [27:00] Mortality and chronic disease outcomes
- [40:01] Type 2 diabetes
- [44:13] Neuroimaging and cognitive outcomes
- [49:48] Conclusions and practical implications
- [58:55] Key ideas segment (Premium-only)
Links & Resources
- Go to episode page (with links to studies)
- Join the Sigma email newsletter for free
- Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium
- Alan Flanagan's Alinea Nutrition Education Hub
- Enroll in the next cohort of our Applied Nutrition Literacy course
- Report: EAT-Lancet
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to another episode of Sigma Nutrition Radio. |
| 0:17.3 | My name is Danny Lennon and with me is Dr. Alan Flanagan. |
| 0:20.2 | Alan, how are you doing? |
| 0:22.2 | I'm very well, thanks. I think the last time we were on, we were in the middle of the study, |
| 0:27.2 | my recent lab study that has now finished. So hopefully at some point in the near future, |
| 0:32.8 | we'll have some data to discuss on that. Yeah. All went well, thankfully. |
| 0:36.9 | Congratulations on that. And a sigh of well, thankfully. Congratulations on that. |
| 0:38.1 | And a sigh of relief that there was a clean and robust data collection and everything passed well on that front. |
| 0:45.5 | Yes. |
| 0:46.2 | Yeah, it's nice. |
| 0:47.2 | A full end of 12, powered for 10. |
| 0:49.6 | So the two extra in the analysis is always nice with small studies like this. |
| 0:56.6 | And yeah, pretty complete sample collection for the constant routine. So we'll have a really nice data set to compare the |
| 1:03.3 | difference in the meal durations and the overnight fasting in terms of any impact we see |
| 1:09.5 | on circadian rhythms in metabolic outcomes. |
| 1:13.3 | So the excitement of working with the participants and having the trial running is all done, |
| 1:18.2 | and now it's switching back into writing and drafting data analysis mode for a while. |
| 1:24.1 | Yeah, the research goes from being very human to very Excel. She's and R. So, yeah, we're into the, we're into the cold hard numbers now. |
| 1:35.1 | Well, we will certainly revisit that once we have more of that data that comes to light and that you can share with us. |
| 1:41.1 | I'm sure we will go through that. In addition to some of your other |
| 1:44.2 | publications that are coming down the line as well. Today, though, we wanted to put our focus on |
| 1:49.2 | something that has been talked about quite a bit recently, and that is the recent 2025 |
... |
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