Great Food Transformation? Criticism of the Planetary Health Diet and the Controversial EAT-Lancet Report

The EAT initiative, founded in 2013 in Scandinavia by Gunhild Stordalen and Johan Rockström, emerged as a hub for global food systems transformation. At the time, Stordalen was married to Norwegian billionaire Petter Stordalen, and Rockström led the Stockholm Resilience Centre. The initiative gained prominence with its inaugural Food Forum in Stockholm in 2014, supported by high-profile figures like the Prince of Wales and Bill Clinton. In 2016, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, the EAT-Lancet Commission was established. Led by Harvard’s Walter Willett, it introduced the Planetary Health Diet, advocating for a semi-vegetarian way of eating at the global level.

EAT’s ambitions extend beyond dietary guidance. Positioning itself as a ‘Davos for food’, it seeks to ‘add value to business and industry’ and ‘shape the political agenda’. Its ties to the World Economic Forum (WEF) are well documented. Gunhild Stordalen graduated as a WEF Young Global Leader in 2015 and maintains close connections with WEF President Børge Brende, a former Norwegian minister and Bilderberg steering committee member. The WEF has been a key supporter of EAT, aligning its Great Food Transformation with the WEF’s Great Reset vision. José María Figueres Olsen, ex-CEO of the WEF and an ‘EAT alumnus’, links the initiative to his sister, Christiana Figueres, former UNFCCC Executive Secretary. Known for her rabiate anti-meat opinions, such as her proposal to exclude meat-eaters from restaurants, Christiana has various ties with organizations within EAT’s broader network, including the World Resources Institute, Unilever, Impossible Foods, and We Mean Business.

As the dietary arm of the WEF, EAT aims to transform diets within a ‘Transition Decade’ (2020–2030). Its ‘portfolio of solutions’ include plant-based imitation foods, lab-grown meat, mycoprotein, and insects. These 'alternative protein' options have often been highlighted by the WEF as ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ technologies for food systems transformation, together with nutrigenetics, blockchain, and virtual reality. Through public-private partnerships, modeled on Davos, EAT and its partners managed to influence policies like the EU’s Green Deal and the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations. However, its vision for transforming dietary habits has faced major challenges. Reports suggest that consumer resistance and market dynamics have hindered adoption with alternative proteins being mostly rejected by global consumers. In response, aiming to revitalize its mission with fresh capital injections and targeted media campaigns, EAT-Lancet 2.0 was launched in October 2026. One of its main aims is to become an ‘IPCC for food’, an idea which has been circulating within the WEF since 2017, where it was propagated by Davos man Joachim von Braun.

EAT collaborates extensively with specific entities within the United Nations, such as WHO and UNEP. This collaboration is facilitated by WEF's strategic partnership with the UN to push forward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. According to critics, this partnership represents nothing short of a corporate capture of the UN, shifting decision-making power towards corporate-led initiatives.

Major agri-food corporations have indeed aligned with the WEF/EAT vision to reform diets by promoting ‘alternative proteins', viewing it as a market expansion opportunity. In 2017, EAT partnered with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development through the FReSH initiative. Additionally, the Food and Land Use Coalition (FOLU) was created, with substantial backing from companies like Unilever and Yara, to roll out the EAT-Lancet agenda.

EAT also garnered public support from vegan-tech investors, such as prince Khaled bin Alwaleed, and the Good Food Institute, the leading lobby group for vegan-tech industries. Together, they maintain close ties with FAIRR, founded by vegan Jeremy Coller with the aim to end ‘industrial livestock’ and serving as a financial pressure group to force business into ‘plant-based’ markets. These players often appear and operate together in various fora and policy campaigns.

The shared strategic vision of EAT, WEF, and WBCSD became very clear during the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit. The Summit faced strong criticism for its corporate dominance, lack of transparency in leadership selection, and concerns over the expertise and funding of the appointed leaders. Various farmer groups, scientsts, and even UN special rapporteurs, have argued that the Summit represented a hostile takeover by transnational corporations, philanthrocapitalists, and Davos.

EAT's Stordalen was appointed to chair the Summit's Action Track 2, which focused on promoting 'sustainable diets'. Her stated aim was 'to take full advantage of the Summit', as to drive the 'far-reaching changes that the world now desperately needs'. The World Health Organization served as the Track's anchoring agency. Francesco Branca, a WHO director and EAT-Lancet Commissioner, is a known advocate of a Davos-style 'reset' of the food systems, including a drastic reduction in meat. 

Action Track 2 was characterized by a strong anti-livestock stance, featuring a vegan advocate as Youth Vice-Chair, the CEO of 50by40—an activist umbrella organization with the mission to halve global livestock herds by 2040—as Civil Society Leader, and various animal rights advocates among its workstream leaders and supportive scientists. To give a seat to the vegan-tech lobby, the Good Food Institute was tasked with leading the 'innovation pillar' across all action tracks.

Ultimately, the EAT-centred ecosystem failed to influence the Summit outcomes to any meaningful degree. The radical and uncompromising behaviour of some of their more zealous elements during the process is said to be part of the reason for this failure, together with reputational damage due to the obvious WEF links.

The Planetary Health Diet heavily restricts animal source foods, calling red meat an ‘unhealthy’ food like sugar, and advocates for alternative proteins. Its first edition, in 2019, set a target for red meat at 5 kg/p/y (within a window of 0-10 kg/p/y) and suggested a total meat intake of 16 kg/p/y (within a window of 0-31 kg/p/y, both red meat and poultry). The suggested caloric contribution by all animal source foods wa a mere 14%; prescribing small daily rations of beef or pork (each at 7 g) and eggs (13 g), in addition to some poultry (29 g), fish (28 g, but limited at 40 kcal), and dairy (250 g, limited at 153 kcal). For comparison, the limit for sugar was set at 31 g (120 kcal). The authors also endorsed a meat-less vegetarian or vitamin B12-supplemented vegan approach as valid options. The second edition, in 2025, mostly maintained these targets with only minor modifications.

Somewhat surprisingly, and in contrast to what is commonly assumed, its semi-vegetarian composition (with a vegan option) is primarily rooted in assumptions about human health, as to minimize chronic disease, rather than environmental considerations. These assumptions go back to the dietary convictions of Harvard's Walter Willett.

Conceptually, EAT’s Great Food Transformation traces back to earlier initiatives for great transition schemes proposed by EAT’s strategic partners. Examples include the 'Great Transformation' suggested by the German Advisory Council on Global Change, the Tellus Institute’s 'Great Transition', and the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ and ‘Great Transformation’. These initiatives not only share the same grandiose vocabulary, but also have multiple historical connections and share a common legacy.

A 'Great Transition' of society to 'Planetary Health' has also been called for in the 2021 ‘São Paulo Declaration on Planetary Health’ organized by the Planetary Health Alliance (PHA). The PHA was launched with support of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2016, is co-housed by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (home of Walter Willett), and wishes to ‘achieve a Great Transition’. The Lancet, the True Health Initiative (with Willett on the Board of Directors), the United Nations Foundation, Project Drawdown, WWF, Plant-based Health Professionals UK, and the Stockholm Environment Institute are among its members. In addition to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, some of the signatories of the Declaration have an outspoken anti-livestock agenda, including 50by40, Beyond Meat, and The Good Food Institute. The document itself is a bizarre New Age-ish pamphlet asking 'spiritual leaders of all faiths' to 'expand the mindset of humanity to embrace ancient teachings and wisdom' and 'to utilize religious and spiritually affiliated institutions for Planetary Health education'. Unsurprisingly, 'plant-based' diets are part of the intention.

The EAT Foundation aggressively pushes for its global ‘Great Food Transformation’ by advocating top-down dietary interventions, an approach which clashes with the bottom-up governance that is usually favoured in developmental studies. Historically, such sweeping, utopian policies have led to control, exploitation, and self-justification, prioritizing structure over people and nature. EAT-Lancet dismisses individual consumer choice, arguing that soft measures will not achieve the needed food system overhaul. It calls for hard policy levers, like restricting dietary options, backed by partners like the World Wildlife Fund and World Resources Institute. The proposed interventionist toolbox includes marketing campaigns, nudging through appealing plant-based product names, digital behavior change tools, supermarket display tweaks, 30-day vegan challenges, and revised dietary guidelines. Harsher measures include mandatory nutritional warnings, ‘sin taxes’, and outright meat bans.

Australia, for instance, is called upon by the EAT-FOLU coaltion to transition to a drastic 91% cut in red meat consumption, redirecting production for export. The C40 Cities initiative, launched at the 2017 EAT Forum, saw 14 global mayors sign the 2019 Good Food Cities Declaration, committing to steer citizens toward the EAT-Lancet diet by 2030, with targets ranging from reduced meat and dairy consumption to ambitious zero-meat and -dairy goals. Some of these cities have already limited meat in public canteens.

Despite the confident tone of the authors, the EAT-Lancet's Planetary Health Diet may not effectively address chronic diseases as intended. Several critics have pointed to major methodological and statistical flaws, to the point of being called “science fiction” by Stanford University's John Ioannidis, one of the leading clinical research methodologist for his work in evidence-based medicine. 

While some observational studies do suggest potential protective effects, others do not or give mixed results. A more serious problem than this inconsistency is the fact that such observational studies are prone to bias. Individuals with the highest EAT-Lancet scores are more likely to follow healthier lifestyles, introducing likeliness of residual confounding. Given the planetary ambitions of the EAT-Lancet diet, it is important to point out that when tested across continents and cultural settings using the global PURE cohort, the diet does not deliver what it promises with respect to all-cause mortality and cardiovascular outcomes.

In addition to being unable to convincingly deliver what it promised, adopting the diet at population level may result in nutritional deficiencies. Several researchers have listed nutrients of concern, including vitamins B12 and D, calcium, iron, zinc, and iodine, but the list may be broader when also scrutinizing robustness to other potential shortcomings (vitamins B2 and B6, long-chain omega 3 fatty acids, choline, …) It remains wishful thinking to assume that fortification and supplementation will sufficiently solve the problem of poor adequacy of nutrients already in short supply and mostly (or sometimes only) availble from animal-soured foods.

Tied to the Davos public-private partnership model, the EAT-Lancet diet’s promotion raises concerns about corporate overreach and sidestepping public accountability. The initiative has also faced a lot of criticism for neglecting some of the broader nutritional, ecological, cultural, and economic factors. Critics argue that it lacks consideration for the realities of different regions, has an urban middle-class bias, and relies on unrealistic assumptions. The diet is costly, hard to access, and clashes with cultural food preferences, while being unaffordable for many, especially in low-income communities. Its promotion misrepresents countries like India and Indonesia as near-vegetarian, ignoring actual local diets and widespread undernourishment. 

Environmentally, the diet’s promises fall short. Scaling up nut production could strain water resources. While it may cut greenhouse gas emissions, the diet risks increasing water use, may worsen biodiversity, and fails to consider food system circularity.