It's not really a diet.

The report draws many, many conclusions, most concerning agriculture: Farms have to become net carbon sinks. The amount of farmland cannot expand.  Yield gaps between farms must be reduced by 75%. Water usage must be reduced and biodiversity increased. Food waste must be slashed by 50%. On the diet side, intake of foods like red meat and sugar must be cut in half while intake of vegetables and poultry must increase by 100%

Hot take: The Healthy Reference Diet is as much about what food gets produced as what food is consumed.

It's not strict.

The healthy reference diet describes baseline amounts of foods you can eat that are both healthy AND sustainable. But it's not meant to be followed to the letter. It's called a reference diet because it's what you "reference" when you're making high-level choices about what kinds of foods to eat, and how much

Hot take: Use the diet as a guideline for the proportions of different types of foods (meats, starches, veggies, etc) to include in your diet. But you don't need to whip out the gram scale.

You'll need to eat a lot less meat.

Some of that reduction is for the sake of your personal health, but a lot of it is based on environmental tolerances. A moderate amount of meat is good for you, but the planet can only produce so much.

Hot take: Reserve different meat categories for different seasons to enjoy larger servings and turn meat into a celebration. We love meat here, and a lot of our focus in this project is going to be how to enjoy it within the constraints of the report

But you don't have to go vegan.

EAT-Lancet is far from a vegan manifesto. The Healthy Reference Diet is a framework that allows for omnivorous diets and vegan diets and everything in between. Beef and pork lovers (like us) are going to struggle a bit because allowances of red meats are very low, but the allowances for other items like poultry, fish, and dairy are quite generous.

Hot take: Be prepared to get creative with your meat consumption and to eat vegetarian frequently, but by no means exclusively.