Open letter to the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change
Last week, The Independent featured your report under the headline ‘UK health bodies call for a new tax on meat to flight climate crisis.’[1] The article noted that your report, titled All-Consuming: Building a Healthier Food System for People and Planet,[2] makes six key recommendations, including mandatory environmental labelling for foods, policies to discourage excess purchases and waste, new rules for public procurement, and carbon taxes on all food producers according to the carbon footprint of their products.
Your report is a response to climate change, but you insist that, by happy coincidence, its recommendations will also be good for human health. And there’s no mistaking your key message, which is that red meat is bad for both planetary and human health. The short executive summary gives a nod to concerns about food waste but devotes a full paragraph to the need to slash red meat consumption in half and swap animal proteins for plant-based proteins.
“In your rush to target red meat, you have managed to miss not one but two giant elephants in the room.”
What’s disappointing is that, in your rush to target red meat, you have managed to miss not one but two giant elephants in the room. Regarding health, there is no comment on the damage being done to health by carbohydrate rich ultra-processed foods, which now make up over 50 per cent of the UK shopping basket and are associated with rising rates of obesity and diabetes. On the environmental front, you have turned a blind eye to the uncomfortable fact that fossil fuels and industry account for 75 per cent of global emissions[3] and 85 per cent of all emissions are derived from sources other than animal agriculture (even more if the sequestration benefits of animal agriculture are taken into account). No amount of tinkering with red meat consumption is going to make a dent in emission levels in the context of fossil fuel-based industries that continue to pump such levels of carbon into the atmosphere.
Your report claims that UK food production and consumption represents around 20 percent of our emissions, half of which is related to imports, largely through feed crops and related deforestation. In the next breath, you point the finger at red meat consumption, as if reducing it were the only and the entire solution to the emissions problem. But both the initial claim and the link to red meat are grossly misleading. Here’s why.
Agricultural production in the UK accounts for 10 per cent of emissions, with emissions from cattle and sheep accounting for just 5.7 percent of the total. If the carbon sequestration effects of livestock on pasture are taken into account, the number drops to 3.7 percent.[4] (This makes plant-based agriculture a bigger contributor to emissions than red meat). Like the rest of Europe, UK livestock agriculture produces few emissions relative to protein. A study found that Western Europe produces 19% of the world’s protein while generating just 8 percent of cattle related emissions.[5]
By using emissions numbers that incorporate imports of animal feed, you are effectively ignoring the fact that most cattle in the UK do not consume much in the way of grains. Around 70 per cent of a typical British beef cattle herd’s diet is grass, with the remainder made up of by-products, silage and grains from crops which would never have been used in the human food chain.[6] The largest share of grain, imported and home grown, goes towards feeding chickens.[7] Globally, and partly because of the relentless demonisation of red meat, we now consume five times more chicken than we did in the 1960s, most of it grain fed and intensively raised. In the UK, while per capita consumption of beef has remained more or less stable since 2009, and consumption of lamb has fallen, consumption of chicken has risen by almost 25 per cent, to over 28 kilos per year.[8] If we should be cutting back on any kind of meat, it should be the white kind.
In addition to blaming cattle for the emissions from the transport of feed crops, you also repeat the WWF claim that food is comparable to transport and domestic energy consumption in terms of its role in personal carbon footprints. This is categorically untrue. Domestic energy use, technology, and transportation (including flying) account for almost 85 percent of per capita emissions in Western nations.[9] The estimated reduction in annual per capita emissions generated by a switch to a vegan diet is .8 of a tonne, whereas simply taking one less return transatlantic flight saves 1.6 tonnes, and living car free saves between 1 and 5.3 tonnes.[10]
That the emissions from cattle and meat are overstated is no surprise, given that the report appears to rely heavily on the work of Marco Springmann and Joseph Poore. Both of these (unashamedly vegan) scientists have produced models that show red meat and all animal foods to be big emissions offenders, but they have been widely criticised for failing to account for different systems of production with greater carbon sequestration potential, for using faulty metrics for methane, and for failing to consider the damage that intensive plant-based agriculture does to soil health. In failing to factor soil degradation into their models, these scientists are ignoring one of the greatest crises we face.
“There is much evidence – not considered by Poore and Springmann – that cattle raised on pasture using regenerative agricultural principles can sequester so much carbon as to render their products carbon negative.”
There is much evidence – not considered by Poore and Springmann – that cattle raised on pasture using regenerative agricultural principles can sequester so much carbon as to render their products carbon negative. An analysis carried out by the US farm White Oak Pastures showed that a pound of their grass raised beef generates carbon emissions of negative 3.5 pounds, as compared to positive 3.5 pounds for an Impossible Burger and 33 pounds for conventional US beef.[11]
Similar results for regeneratively produced beef are beginning to be documented in the UK. Groups such as the PFLA (Pasture Raised Livestock Association) and 3LM (the UK arm of the Savoury Institute) are working towards enabling UK livestock farming to maximise the sequestration benefits of grazing cattle and regenerative principles. You do acknowledge this, stating that switching from intensive to agroecological methods could reduce emissions by 40 to 47 percent across Europe and that pasture itself can act as a carbon sink. In the next breath you dismiss these benefits, stating (completely without foundation) that these benefits “do not outweigh the overwhelming impact of red meat production”.
If you have underplayed the benefits of regenerative agriculture, you have completely ignored evidence that the eradication of meat from our diets would do very little to reduce emissions. A study by White and Hall found that emissions might be reduced by a mere 2.6 percent, and this at great cost to nutrition and health.[12] Another paper found that swapping meat for plant-based proteins would also have a limited effect on the overall requirement for land use for food production.[13]
You also fail to acknowledge evidence that it is not cattle on pasture that are a threat to biodiversity, but intensive industrial agriculture deploying the very pesticides and practices used with genetically engineered crops like the soy destined for plant-based burgers. Well managed rangelands enhance biodiversity, providing an important “ecosystem service” in farming by offering foraging and nesting habitat that supports populations of wild bees and other naturally occurring crop pollinators.” Rangeland also provides a “diverse array of flowering forbs (herbaceous plants), shrubs, and trees that furnish successive blooms, supporting the needs of multiple bee species.”[14]
“The health claims against red meat contained within your report are as spurious as those pertaining to emissions and biodiversity.”
The health claims against red meat contained within your report are as spurious as those pertaining to emissions and biodiversity. It is claimed that “there is clear evidence that replacing animal protein with plant-based protein results in lower rates of stroke, heart disease, diabetes and overall death rates.” Papers by Marco Springmann and Walter Willet are cited as evidence. Springmann’s team has gone on record as saying that nutrition is not a key consideration when considering global diets[15], and his own model relies on weak and outdated epidemiological evidence linking meat and health outcomes. Willet has spent most of his career pursuing a plant-based agenda and trying but failing to prove that meat causes cancer. I’m not sure we should be relying so heavily on the work of these two individuals to formulate a definitive stance on meat and health.
In fact, the alleged link between red meat and disease was debunked by a series of reviews published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.[16] These rigorous large scale meta analyses led researchers to conclude that the evidence linking meat consumption to heart disease and cancer is of ‘low to very low certainty’. They advised the continued consumption of red and processed meat. Other research supports the Annals conclusions. The Prospective Urban Rural epidemiology (PURE) study of over 135,000 people in 18 countries showed that those who regularly eat meat (including red) are 25 per cent less likely to develop heart disease than people who do not eat meat, provided both groups eat an otherwise balanced diet.[17] Another study in The Lancet looked at the risks associated with fifteen different aspects of diet (including, for example, the risks from diets high in transfats or diets low in fruits and vegetables). Diets high in red meat came last in terms of being risks for both deaths and Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYS).[18] In other words, reducing red meat consumption is the last thing we should be thinking about when trying to improve long term health outcomes.
If the Alliance want to hang its anti-red meat stance on the alleged dangers of saturated fat, you are woefully misguided on this front too. The diet-heart hypothesis (Ancel Key’s famous theory linking saturate fat and cholesterol to heart disease) is dead, and two of the many studies that killed it are the 700 million dollar Women’s Health Initiative Randomized Controlled Dietary Modification Study (WHIRCDMT, sometimes referred to simply as WHI) which showed no connection between fat intake and heart disease, and the PURE study noted above, which found that those who ate animal protein and fat had fewer heart attacks than those who ate more cereal grains. [19]
Far from doing us harm, red meat has been shown to be highly nutritious and to have enormous health benefits. These benefits led a team of researchers to warn against heeding the anti-meat messages issued by organisations such as the WHO (and now the Alliance):
There are reasons to keep red meat in the diet. Red meat (beef in particular) is a nutrient dense food and typically has a better ratio of N6:N3 polyunsaturated fatty acids and significantly more vitamin A, B6 and B12, zinc and iron than white meat…iron deficiencies are still common in parts of both developing and industrialised countries, particularly pre-school children and women of childbearing age…red meat also contains high levels of carnitine, coenzyme Q10, and creatine, which are bioactive compounds that may have positive effects on health. [20]
This is to say nothing about the superior bioavailability and quality of meat protein (in terms of amino acid profile) as compared to plant proteins. Even the authors of the EAT-Lancet commission, whose recommended diet is largely plant-based, admit that “animal sources of protein are of higher quality than most plant sources.”[21]
In its adoption of an anti-red meat stance, the Alliance is following in the footsteps of the authors of both the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet and the UK’s Eatwell Guide. Your report references both diets, stating that the Eatwell Guide represents a “good starting point for illustrating what a healthy, climate friendly diet looks like.” In fact, the Eatwell Guide has been guiding us towards escalating levels of obesity and diabetes. We should not be under any illusions that this guide was based on evidence as to its health-giving properties or even created with health in mind. The group appointed by Public Health England to come up with the guide consisted primarily of food and drink industry representatives, including the Institute of Grocery Distribution (whose members include Kelloggs, Mars and PepsiCo) and the British Nutrition Foundation (whose members include Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and Nestle).[22]
The evidence behind the EAT-Lancet diet has also been shown to be lacking. The diet was found to be high in carbohydrates and seriously deficient in Vitamin B12, retinol (the form in which the body needs vitamin A), Vitamin D (and in particular, D3, which is the body’s preferred form), Vitamin K, Sodium, Potassium, Calcium, Iron, and Omega-3. [23] Even the diet’s creators admitted that the diet was not suitable for babies, children, young women, pregnant women, the elderly and the frail.
The Alliance’s support for the Eatwell Guide as a good “starting point” stands in stark contrast to the recommendations of another group, the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, although this hasn’t stopped you from quoting from the Panel’s report. The Global Panel’s recommendations, set out in its Foresight 2.0 report, Future Food Systems, call for a 17 percent increase in consumption of meat and meat alternatives, a 50 percent increase in consumption of fruits and vegetables and a reduction in consumption of cereals and starches from 41 to 26 percent of the diet.[24] Meanwhile, those cereals and starches constitute 40 percent of the Eatwell diet, which you endorse. The Foresight 2.0 report is also overwhelmingly focused on making nutrient dense foods more available, accessible, affordable and desirable, and the word nutrition is used repeatedly throughout the text. The Alliance does not use the term even once.
“We would end up on a diet of cakes and pastries, chocolate, pasta, liqueurs, spirts and wine, bread, bananas, soya milk, salad, soft drinks, sugar and sweets.”
If, on the back of the Alliance’s recommendations, policy makers opt to use the Eatwell Guide as the basis of its food labelling systems, we will all be set on path towards making some very bad food choices. A recent paper (expertly analysed by Dr Zoe Harcombe) claimed that adherence to the Eatwell Guide could lower your environmental footprint. The paper looked at a wide variety of food in terms of both emissions and blue water use. Lamb, beef and other animal foods like fish, butter and cheese came top of the list in terms of both emissions and water use. (Although rice stood out as a big plant-food offender in terms of blue water use, requiring five times as much water as beef). If the czars of food labelling were to take their cue from the paper, encouraging us to base our diets around its list of the least offending foods, we would all end up on a diet of manufactured buns, cakes and pastries, chocolate, pasta, liqueurs, spirts and wine, bread, bananas, soya milk, salad, soft drinks, sugar and sweets.[25]
Using simplistic emissions calculations as the basis of a food labelling system would simply compound the insanity of the existing food labelling system, which gives a green light to nutritionally vacuous and sugar filled foods like cereals while warning us against foods like sardines. (Those oily fish from which we are supposed to get our omega-3).
We’re also in trouble if policy makers take the Alliance’s recommendations to base public procurement for the NHS on Eatwell principles. Patients recovering in hospital need the most nutrient dense food available, and that means meat and other animal foods alongside fruits and vegetables. For those with diabetes, in particular, a hospital meal based on the carbohydrate heavy Eatwell Guide is a recipe for disaster. You say that the NHS “should be a leader in the fight against climate change.” No. The NHS needs to put patient health first, while being cognisant of procuring the most nutrient dense foods – which, by definition, must include meat, fish and eggs - from the most sustainable (and local) sources possible.
The biggest danger is that if the Alliance’s scaremongering about the adverse health impact of red meat takes hold and its suggestions for food labelling and taxation measures are implemented, the “less but better meat” message (fleetingly mentioned on page 8 of your report) will be completely lost. Those on lower incomes will likely be driven towards increased consumption of processed foods, particularly the plant-based burger variety. Nutritional deficiencies are bound to result, along with rising levels of childhood stunting.
Your report concludes in a rather lacklustre manner, falling back on vague commentary about how producers, retailers and government all have a role to play in reducing emissions and a bit of conciliatory talk about food being ‘a deeply social issue’ that is ‘tied to identity’. A more impactful conclusion might have been one like the following:
It is indisputable that fossil fuel use is the number one driver of global carbon emissions. That said, every sector, including agriculture must play its part in reducing emissions. Food waste must be addressed, as well as the transport related emissions from all imported foods. Wherever possible, foods produced in this country should be favoured over and above those flown in. This means that the consumption of sustainable local meat and vegetable produce should be encouraged, while the importation of nutrient poor foods should be actively discouraged. In particular, consumption of imported soy-based foods such as tofu and the soy and palm oils that are used in such abundance in processed foods should be discouraged. People should be encouraged to eat according to the seasons, which means not demanding strawberries in February. They should also be encouraged to cook more of their own food, and to resist the lure of the ultra-processed foods that are so damaging to health. To this end, the government should consider taxing processed food and drink, in addition to imported, out of season fruits and vegetables, while implementing policies that make real, whole, nutritious, locally produced food more affordable to all. This will involve supporting farmers as they make the transition from conventional farming methods to those that are regenerative, thereby improving soil health and increasing carbon sequestration and biodiversity levels while enhancing the nutrient density of food.
“It’s about real food. We need to encourage people to eat a wide variety of real foods produced by regenerative farms, and we need policy makers to do everything within their power to enable this.”
Perhaps the message is even simpler than this. It’s about real food. We need to encourage people to eat a wide variety of real foods produced by regenerative farms, and we need policy makers to do everything within their power to enable this. I wish that you, the Alliance, had taken the opportunity to press home this real food message. Both human and planetary health would have been better served if you had.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/meat-tax-climate-change-uk-b1588526.html[2] http://www.ukhealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/UKHACC-ALL-Consuming-Building-a-Healthier-Food-System-for-People-Planet.pdf[3] https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/12/new-global-co2-emissions-numbers-are-they-re-not-good[4] NFU, “The facts about British red meat and milk.” https://www.nfuonline.com[5] FAO GLEAM report . Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model) and Barclay’s research.[6] NFU, “The facts about British red meat and milk.” https://www.nfuonline.com[7] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/05/vast-animal-feed-crops-meat-needs-destroying-plant[8] https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/298951-0[9] Wynes, Seth and Nicholas, K. “The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions,” 12 July 2017, IOP Publishing Ltd, environmental Research Letters, Volume 12, Number 7. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541[10] Wynes, as above[11] https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grassfed-beef[12] https://www.pnas.org/content/114/48/E10301[13] Leinonen, I et al. Regional land use efficiency and nutritional quality of protein production. Elsevier, 17 May 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100386[14] All quotes in this paragraph are from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/07/a-way-to-save-americas-bees-buy-free-range-beef/241935/[15] White, R and Hall, MB, “Reply to Van Meerbeek and Svenning, emery, and Springmann et al.: Clarifying assumptions and objectives in evaluating effects of food system shift on human diets. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/rticles/PMC5828631/ and Springmann, M, Clark M, Willet w. Feedlot diet for Americans that results from a misspecified optimization algorithm. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2018;115:E1704-E1705 [PMC free article] [Pub Med] {Google Scholar][16] Johnston, Bradley C. et al, “Unprocessed Red Meat and Processed Meat Consumption: Dietary Guideline Recommendations from the Nutritional Recommendations (NutriRECS) Consortium, in Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol 171, no. 10, 19 November 2019.[17] Dehghan, M et al. “Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study.” Lancet 2017; 390: 2050-62. Published on line Aug 29 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)32252-3[18] Murray, Christopher JL et al. Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries, 1990-2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. , The Lancet, vol 393, issue 10184, 11 May 2019, p1958-1972. https://www.thelancet.com/article/s0140-6736(19)30041-8/fulltext.[19] PURE, as noted above[20] Oostinjer M et al. The role of red and processed meat in colorectal cancer development: a perspective. Meat Science 97:583 -596. 2014[21] EAT Lancet report as cited in “EAT-Lancet’s Plant-Based Planet: 10 Things You Need to Know, https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/diagnosis-diet/201901/ear-lancets-plant-based-planet-10-things-you-need-to-know[1][22] Public Health Collaboration Research, www.phcuk.org[23] https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2019/01/the-eat-lancet-diet-is-nuritionally-deficient/[24] Foresight 2.0, https://www.glopan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Foresight-2_WEB_2Nov.pdf[25] https://www.zoeharcombe.com/2020/10/the-eatwell-guide-the-environment/