Plant-Based Diets Could Save Millions of Lives and Trillions of Dollars a Year

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Based on a meta-analysis of studies following millions of people and their diets for years, better adherence to more plant-based diets, especially ones emphasizing healthy plant foods, is beneficial for lowering the risks of major chronic conditions, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, as well as premature deaths in general. Moving to diets with fewer animal-sourced foods could end up saving the lives of millions of people every year, in addition to saving trillions of dollars. Here’s how many lives would be saved by a healthy global diet, which is like more of a Mediterranean cut-down-on-red meat-and-sugar and eat-lots-of-fruits-and-vegetables diet, versus a vegetarian diet, versus a vegan diet.

So, we’re talking major health benefits eating fewer animal-sourced foods; healthier diets could save five million lives a year. If the world went vegetarian, we’d save seven million lives a year, and if the world started eating vegan, we might save eight million lives per year.

So, the question is less “what to do” and more “how to do it.” In other words, the main problem is the implementation gap, which is likely a result of things like inertia, individual addictions, commercial interests, and economic issues. For example, why did the World Health Organization pull support from a global initiative promoting more plant-based foods? Yeah, eating that way might save millions of lives, but a global move to such a diet could lead to the loss of millions of jobs linked to animal agriculture. “’[T]he total or nearly total elimination of foods of animal origin would destroy cattle farming and many other activities related to the production of meat and dairy products.” “The initiative ’urging for a centralized control of our dietary choices’ risked ‘the total elimination of consumers’ freedom of choice.’” And that was the reaction to just recommending people try eating more plant-based.

And hey, that’s just meat and dairy. Think of how many jobs in the candy and liquor industries would be lost if people all of a sudden decided to eat and drink healthier. It could have drastic consequences. There is a reason that soda companies sponsor major health organizations. Over a five-year period, researchers found that the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo sponsored “a total of 96 national health organizations in United States, including many medical and public health institutions whose specific missions include fighting the obesity epidemic.” The American Academy of Family Physicians took their money, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the AMA, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the Society for Nutrition Educators. Maybe the soda companies genuinely care about the public’s health? Hardly. During the same study period, those same two corporations lobbied against 29 public health bills intended to reduce soda consumption or improve nutrition.

Although national food guidelines are designed, ostensibly, to translate scientific evidence with respect to food, dietary patterns, and health, their development has increasingly become a corporate and political process as much as scientific one, often with corporate and political influences overriding the science. As I detailed before, this goes back all the way to the first edition of the American food goals, which started out strongly recommending decreasing our intake of meat, dairy, and eggs to reduce saturated fat, as well as reducing salt and sugar intake. However, lobbyists reacted vehemently, and succeeded in having the wording in the report changed to “increase the consumption of lean meat.” Thus, the year in which protecting public health in the United States became secondary to protecting corporate health and wealth was 1977.

Now, nearly 50 years later, the effort of the dietary guidelines advisory committee is recognized for all the work they do, but despite these achievements, some key recommendations in the current guidelines do not reflect the best available evidence that “strongly support shifting toward lower consumption of animal protein sources, and higher intakes of healthy plant sources.” But it’s such a politically hot button issue that even when it comes to the worst of the worst—processed meats, like bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage—known to cause cancer in human beings, yet all we have are provisos “to consume these carcinogenic foods ‘in moderation.’”

Given that there may be no safe limit for alcohol consumption, the Canadian guidelines advise no more than one to two drinks a week. Its dietary guidelines were updated to emphasize the importance of consuming more plant-based products, and even removed dairy as its own food group. How were the Canadians so free to be able to better follow the evidence? They decided to remove industry-funded studies from their consideration. What a concept.

If we were going to try to stick to the best science, the eating pattern that is healthiest for humans, the one that best reduces the risk of our leading killers would be a diet centered around whole plant foods. The reason we don’t see this in national food guide recommendations can be explained by factors other than science––specifically, corporate interests reflected in heavily government‐subsidized, animal‐sourced products and the political might of the ultra-processed food industry.

A whole food, plant-based diet might be considered the dietary gold standard against which other dietary patterns could be compared, if for no other reason than it’s the only diet that has been shown to reliably reverse the progression of coronary atherosclerosis, the number one killer of men and women. What else do we need? So, if we wanted an unbiased, evidence-based Universal Food Guide, if might look a little something like this. And for those of you thinking, hey, that looks kinda familiar, that’s because it’s the Daily Dozen. So, you can use the free Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen app as a reminder to fit some of the healthiest of healthy foods into your daily routine.

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• Wang Y, Liu B, Han H, et al. Associations between plant-based dietary patterns and risks of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and mortality - a systematic review and meta-analysis [published correction appears in Nutr J. 2024 Jan 4;23(1):6. doi: 10.1186/s12937-023-00891-4.]. Nutr J. 2023;22(1):46.
• Springmann M, Godfray HC, Rayner M, Scarborough P. Analysis and valuation of the health and climate change cobenefits of dietary change. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016;113(15):4146-4151.
• Puska P, Jaini P. The North Karelia Project: Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease in Finland Through Population-Based Lifestyle Interventions. Am J Lifestyle Med. 2020;14(5):495-499.
• Torjesen I. WHO pulls support from initiative promoting global move to plant based foods. BMJ. 2019;365:l1700.
• Aaron DG, Siegel MB. Sponsorship of National Health Organizations by Two Major Soda Companies. Am J Prev Med. 2017;52(1):20-30.
• Dean E, Xu J, Jones AY, et al. An unbiased, sustainable, evidence-informed Universal Food Guide: a timely template for national food guides [published correction appears in Nutr J. 2024 Nov 15;23(1):144. doi: 10.1186/s12937-024-01043-y.]. Nutr J. 2024;23(1):126. Published 2024 Oct 18. doi:10.1186/s12937-024-01018-z
• Willett WC, Hu FB, Rimm EB, Stampfer MJ. Building better guidelines for healthy and sustainable diets. Am J Clin Nutr. 2021;114(2):401-404.
• Jacobs ET, Foote JA, Kohler LN, Skiba MB, Thomson CA. Re-examination of dairy as a single commodity in US dietary guidance. Nutr Rev. 2020;78(3):225-234.

Motion graphics by Avo Media

• bacon
• cancer
• Coca-Cola
• Daily Dozen
• dairy
• diabetes
• eggs
• ham
• heart disease
• meat
• Plant-Based Diets
• soda
• World Health Organization