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What humanity should eat to stay healthy and save the planet

What we eat needs to be nutritious and sustainable. Researchers are trying to figure out what that looks like around the world.
  1. Gayathri Vaidyanathan

    1. Gayathri Vaidyanathan is a freelance science writer based in Bangalore, India.

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Conceptual illustration showing the healthy diet inside a world-bun.

Illustration by Paweł Jońca

A clutch of fishing villages dot the coast near Kilifi, north of Mombasa in Kenya. The waters are home to parrot fish, octopus and other edible species. But despite living on the shores, the children in the villages rarely eat seafood. Their staple meal is ugali, maize (corn) flour mixed with water, and most of their nutrition comes from plants. Almost half the kids here have stunted growth — twice the national rate.

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Nature 600, 22-25 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03565-5

Updates & Corrections

  • Clarification 21 December 2021: An earlier version of this feature misquoted Iannotti’s explanation of how the FAO committee would improve on the EAT–Lancet analysis. The committee is not redoing the study, but rather doing a separate analysis that might overlap with the original work.

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