Militant_Vegan_
Banned
- Joined
- Feb 20, 2016
- Messages
- 3,089
- Reaction score
- 571
- Gender
- Undisclosed
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
Another Nation Trims Meat From Diet Advice | The Plate
Nutrition advisers in the Netherlands took a progressive step this week, one that will likely further stoke conversations about the relationship between a healthy diet and a healthy planet. And their sights are set squarely on meat.
The Netherlands Nutrition Centre says it is recommending people eat just two servings of meat a week, setting an explicit limit on meat consumption for the first time. The recommendations come five years after a government panel weighed the ecological impact of the average Dutch person’s diet, concluding last year that eating less meat is better for human and environmental health.
The Nutrition Centre, a government-funded program responsible for making food-based dietary guidelines, took those conclusions and presented them on Tuesday in its “Wheel of Five”—a graphic distributed to the public, along the lines of the U.S. government’s “MyPlate.”
“The new dietary guidelines are implemented in our new education model … in a way that the total environmental impact of the diet is lower than the current consumption,” explains Corné van Dooren, a sustainable food expert at the center. “We focus on eating a less animal-based and more plant-based diet by the unique advice to consume not more than 500 grams of meat a week.”
Of that 500 grams, or about one pound, only 300 grams should be red, or “high-carbon” meat, van Dooren noted, explaining that the guidelines suggest getting protein from other sources, like one 25-gram portion of unsalted nuts a day and one 135-gram portion of pulses a week. Seafood recommendations also get an update.
“The advice for fish is changed from two portions to one portion a week, due to sustainability issues,” van Dooren adds. “One portion is enough to reach the benefits for coronary heart diseases.”
Over the past decade, a handful of countries have started to more seriously consider environmental factors in their official nutrition advice, including the U.S. That’s out of the more than 60 countries that maintain and update nutrition advice, according to the FAO.
“There are just a very few countries that have taken this issue on,” says Kathleen Merrigan, former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, now the executive director of sustainability at George Washington University. “It’s a moving target.”
In 2014, Merrigan helped convene a conference on food sustainability, inviting government nutrition advisers from the Netherlands and Brazil, two of the countries that have worked most intensively on the issue. (In 2012, Brazil set new recommendations that factored in “environmental integrity,” fair trade principles and the eating patterns of indigenous food cultures.)
Other countries that have included sustainability into their nutrition advice, or have seriously contemplated doing so, include Germany, Australia, Sweden, and the U.K.
Nutrition advisers in the Netherlands took a progressive step this week, one that will likely further stoke conversations about the relationship between a healthy diet and a healthy planet. And their sights are set squarely on meat.
The Netherlands Nutrition Centre says it is recommending people eat just two servings of meat a week, setting an explicit limit on meat consumption for the first time. The recommendations come five years after a government panel weighed the ecological impact of the average Dutch person’s diet, concluding last year that eating less meat is better for human and environmental health.
The Nutrition Centre, a government-funded program responsible for making food-based dietary guidelines, took those conclusions and presented them on Tuesday in its “Wheel of Five”—a graphic distributed to the public, along the lines of the U.S. government’s “MyPlate.”
“The new dietary guidelines are implemented in our new education model … in a way that the total environmental impact of the diet is lower than the current consumption,” explains Corné van Dooren, a sustainable food expert at the center. “We focus on eating a less animal-based and more plant-based diet by the unique advice to consume not more than 500 grams of meat a week.”
Of that 500 grams, or about one pound, only 300 grams should be red, or “high-carbon” meat, van Dooren noted, explaining that the guidelines suggest getting protein from other sources, like one 25-gram portion of unsalted nuts a day and one 135-gram portion of pulses a week. Seafood recommendations also get an update.
“The advice for fish is changed from two portions to one portion a week, due to sustainability issues,” van Dooren adds. “One portion is enough to reach the benefits for coronary heart diseases.”
Over the past decade, a handful of countries have started to more seriously consider environmental factors in their official nutrition advice, including the U.S. That’s out of the more than 60 countries that maintain and update nutrition advice, according to the FAO.
“There are just a very few countries that have taken this issue on,” says Kathleen Merrigan, former deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, now the executive director of sustainability at George Washington University. “It’s a moving target.”
In 2014, Merrigan helped convene a conference on food sustainability, inviting government nutrition advisers from the Netherlands and Brazil, two of the countries that have worked most intensively on the issue. (In 2012, Brazil set new recommendations that factored in “environmental integrity,” fair trade principles and the eating patterns of indigenous food cultures.)
Other countries that have included sustainability into their nutrition advice, or have seriously contemplated doing so, include Germany, Australia, Sweden, and the U.K.