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. 2019 Nov 1;10(Suppl_4):S275-S283.
doi: 10.1093/advances/nmy117.

Plant-Based Diets for Personal, Population, and Planetary Health

Elena C Hemler  1 , Frank B Hu  1   2   3
Affiliations

Plant-Based Diets for Personal, Population, and Planetary Health

Elena C Hemler et al. Adv Nutr. .

Abstract

Worldwide, the burden of morbidity and mortality from diet-related chronic diseases is increasing, driven by poor diet quality and overconsumption of calories. At the same time, the global food production system is draining our planet's resources, jeopardizing the environment and future food security. Personal, population, and planetary health are closely intertwined and will all continue to be vulnerable to these threats unless action is taken. Fortunately, shifting current global dietary patterns towards high-quality, plant-based diets could alleviate these health and environmental burdens. Compared with typical Western diets with high amounts of animal products, healthy plant-based diets are not only more sustainable, but have also been associated with lower risk of chronic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. For personalized disease management and prevention, precision nutrition has the potential to offer more effective approaches tailored to individual characteristics such as the genome, metabolome, and microbiome. However, this area of research is in the early stages and is not yet ready for widespread clinical use. Therefore, it must not overshadow public health nutrition strategies, which have the power to improve health and sustainability on a larger scale. If widely implemented, interventions and policy changes that shift the globe towards healthy plant-based dietary patterns could be instrumental in ensuring future personal, population, and planetary health.

Keywords: cardiovascular disease; obesity; plant-based diets; precision nutrition; public health nutrition; sustainable nutrition; type 2 diabetes.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Change in total mortality risk associated with increments of calorie intake from specific types of fat in the Nurses’ Health Study and Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Multivariable HRs are shown for total mortality associated with replacing the percentage of energy from total carbohydrates with the same energy from specific types of fat (P-trend < 0.001 for all), adjusted for age, race, marital status, BMI, physical activity, smoking status, alcohol consumption, multivitamin use, vitamin E supplement use, current aspirin use, family history of myocardial infarction, family history of diabetes, family history of cancer, history of hypertension, history of hypercholesterolemia, intakes of total energy and dietary cholesterol, percentage of energy intake from dietary protein, menopausal status and hormone use in women, and percentage of energy from the remaining specific types of fat. Reproduced with permission from reference .
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
The precision nutrition plate: types of individual data that are important to consider in precision nutrition research. Reproduced with permission from reference .
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
The intersection between population, personal, and planetary health and relation to public health nutrition, precision nutrition, and sustainable nutrition.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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