Published: 07/21/2026
By Jamie Hansen, Global Health Communications Manager, and Catherine Wu, Communications Assistant
Photo: A woman in front of her fruit and vegetable stand in a local market in Nairobi. Jonathan Torgovnik/Getty Images/Images of Empowerment
In a new study published in Nature, Dr. Matthew Gibson, PhD, and co-authors model what a global shift toward healthy, sustainable diets, paired with increased farm productivity and reduced food waste, would mean for human and planetary health – as well as the livelihoods of food producers.
They found that this shift away from animal sources of protein and toward a plant-based diet, in alignment with the 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission recommendations, would improve human health while cutting global agricultural land use 6% by 2050 and reduce agriculture-related CO₂ emissions by 85%.
Gibson, a Stanford-LSHTM Planetary Health postdoctoral fellow based at LSHTM’s Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health, also found that this transition would fundamentally reshape livestock production and affect the livelihood millions of farmers and food producers. The scale of this potential change is a reason for governments to act deliberately, confronting the interests invested in a status quo of a global food system that “fails both those who produce our food and those who should be nourished by it,” Gibson told the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
“Transforming food systems would deliver enormous potential benefits to our health and the environment but, as our results make clear, they would also lead to fundamental changes to global agriculture and affect the lives of millions of farmers and food producers,” Gibson said. “Rather than using these results as an excuse for inaction it’s critical that governments rise to the challenge and make difficult decisions for the good of our health and the planet.”