The Place of Meat and Dairy in Global Healthy and Sustainable Diets (360G-Wellcome-201797_Z_16_Z)

The transition to diets rich in meat and dairy is occurring at different rates throughout the world. It is a key driver of the increase in mortality and morbidity associated with diet-related disease and also of the increasing impact of food production on the natural environment. It also has huge cultural and economic significance. It is commonplace today to call for "food system thinking" when considering how diets might be changed to improve heath and sustainability outcomes, but much more rare for this to be put into practice. We shall build an interdisciplinary food system team to show what changes in meat and dairy consumption will provide the greatest health and environment benefits and develop interventions to help bring them about. Our programme will develop innovative global health models, based on novel epidemiological data, to radically improve policy development and provide multiple food system and environmental outputs. In both a developed and developing country setting we shall propose and test novel interventions for healthy and sustainable diets, understanding their interconnectedness and the social and political contexts underlying successful implementation. We shall provide an independent source of evidence to inform debates on meat and dairy.