Now more than ever, we must integrate nutrition science into policy to empower healthcare professionals and promote diets that are healthy for people and sustainable for the planet: How and why?
Our dietary choices extend beyond ourselves to the planet that we inhabit. Current food systems are pushing climate, ecosystems, land, and freshwater resources beyond safe operating limits that represent deep interconnected outcomes of the same policy failures.
Improving diet quality offers one of the most powerful and underused policy solutions available. Strong evidence shows that healthier diets could substantially reduce the incidence of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and related metabolic conditions, preventing up to deaths. At the same time, shifts in food demand toward healthier dietary patterns would cause environmental pressures, cutting food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 30–50%, land use by up to 70%, water use by up to 35%, and nutrient pollution by more than half.
Despite this evidence, nutrition remains consistently undervalued in public policy. It is too often treated as an individual lifestyle issue rather than a structural factor of health, economic productivity, and environmental sustainability. Integrating nutrition into health, agricultural, climate, and social policy is therefore not an ideological choice, but a pragmatic and necessary response to escalating health costs and environmental risk. Nutritional policy and recommendations are also highly fragmented across countries and institutions, with differing guidelines, priorities, and messages that often confuse the public and dilute impact. Greater coordination among governments is essential to align dietary guidance, strengthen credibility, and provide clear, consistent signals that support healthier and more sustainable food systems globally.
Nutrition as a foundation of human and planetary health
Food systems are failing on multiple fronts, with hundreds of millions living with diet-related chronic diseases. All evidence indicates that diabetes prevalence is increasing worldwide, primarily due to a rise in obesity caused by multiple risk factors, factors that are largely preventable. Among the risk factors, unhealthy diets contribute to over 14.1 million cases of type 2 diabetes, representing over 70% of new diagnoses globally.
At the same time, current patterns of food production and consumption are accelerating environmental breakdown. Rising demand for resource-intensive foods, particularly meat and dairy in high-income settings, is driving deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Beef production alone is responsible for approximately deforestation, directly undermining climate mitigation efforts and long-term food security.
These health and environmental harms reinforce one another. Climate change and ecosystem degradation destabilise food production, increase food prices, and exacerbate both undernutrition and diet-related disease. A stable climate, healthy soils, clean water, and biodiversity are therefore not environmental “co-benefits” of good policy; they are prerequisites for public health. Protecting these systems must be understood as a core responsibility of health policy.
The role of physicians
Despite diet being one of the most influential determinants of health outcomes, nutrition is marginalised in medical education, healthcare delivery, and policy frameworks worldwide.
Many physicians receive minimal formal training in nutrition, limiting their ability to address diet as a clinical risk factor or preventive tool. This is not a failure of individual clinicians, but of policy choices that have excluded nutrition from core health system design. Healthcare institutions themselves often reinforce this disconnect, and hospitals and care facilities frequently provide food that contradicts evidence-based dietary guidelines. Yet, the trusted voice of healthcare professionals positions them as powerful food systems transformation advocates.
The role of policymakers
Policymakers have a clear role to play in setting standards, incentives, and accountability mechanisms that align healthcare systems towards prevention-centred dietary strategies.
Developing and implementing strategies that will have long-lasting impacts at the population level remains a persistent challenge for policymakers.
However, by aligning policies across health, agriculture, education, and finance, policymakers can ensure the production and access to nutritious and sustainable food. Key areas of action include, for instance:
- Creating national dietary guidelines that benefit both human and planetary health principles and integrating them into procurement standards and healthcare frameworks;
- Making the healthy choice the easiest, most affordable, accessible, and available option in all settings by implementing procurement policies with mandatory standards
- Using fiscal tools like subsidies and pricing reforms to make healthy foods more affordable and accessible;
- Establishing sustainable funding mechanisms and workforce capacity to make nutrition education a routine part of healthcare systems
The Planetary Health Diet: A practical evidence-based policy framework for change
The Planetary Health Diet, developed by the EAT–Lancet Commission, offers a robust, science-based reference for aligning nutrition policy with both health and environmental objectives. Emphasising whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated fats, with lower and more moderate consumption of animal-source foods, it demonstrates that dietary patterns supporting long-term health are also compatible with planetary limits.
To translate this evidence into action, the Physicians Association for Nutrition (PAN International), in collaboration with EAT, convened more than 70 healthcare organisations to develop an Action Brief for Healthcare Professionals. This framework outlines concrete steps to embed nutrition into medical practice and education, strengthen prevention, and mobilise healthcare professionals as advocates for food system reform.
The Action Brief organises policy-relevant actions around three pillars:
- Actions to implement
- Integrating nutrition into clinical care and training, reorienting healthcare systems towards prevention, and supporting healthcare professionals as food system leaders.
- Actions to stop or reform
- Moving beyond narrow nutrient-focused approaches, improving hospital and institutional food environments, and addressing under- and over-nutrition together.
- Enablers for collaboration
- Aligning policymakers, healthcare institutions, caterers, educators, and professional bodies to remove structural barriers.
Policy priorities will vary by context. In many high-income countries, reducing excessive consumption of meat and ultra-processed foods may be necessary, while elsewhere, improving dietary diversity, addressing undernutrition, or preventing harmful dietary transitions may be prioritised. Nutrition science provides the framework to guarantee the flexibility needed to tailor dietary patterns within planetary boundaries.
Integrating nutrition into health systems and governance
Empowering healthcare professionals to promote diets that support both human and planetary health is a massive opportunity for policymakers. What people eat and how health systems guide those choices are shaped by regulation, education and incentives. Treating nutrition as a core component of health and sustainability policy is essential to reducing disease burden, strengthening resilience, and safeguarding the life-support systems on which all public health depends.