Global experts call for plant-predominant diets and active lifestyles to combat escalating health crises

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, December 9, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A landmark international consensus report outlines a compelling science-driven “roadmap” for tackling today’s global health crisis—and emphasizes the urgent need for societies to transition toward plant-predominant food systems. It draws on the collective wisdom of 64 experts from 72 entities across 5 continents.

Why change is imperative
• Despite rapid advances in medicine and public health, chronic lifestyle-related diseases remain the leading causes of preventable illness and death worldwide. Poor dietary patterns—particularly those high in animal products and processed foods—and unhealthy habits continue to drive cardiovascular disease, cancers, type-2-diabetes, obesity, generating massive health costs for nations.
• Public-health strategies prioritising “Prevention over Treatment” to empower individuals through knowledge and personal behaviours, especially those centred on dietary choices, offer 4-times greater life-saving potential than health care alone.
• Yet, current food systems—heavily reliant on animal products—are misaligned with both public and planetary health goals.

A comprehensive set of expert recommendations
The 101-statements report is aimed at reorienting public health efforts towards de-medicalized, holistic, personalized health approaches and offers a blueprint for re-shaping health policy, i.e. stimulating transition toward sustainable food systems and daily activity, public health guidance and education.

Key messages include:
• Central is the dual HEAL (“Healthy Eating & Active Living”) approach as minimum recommendation for individuals and public health. Whole-food plant-predominant, healthy eating linked to daily activity, is foundational for health promotion, disease prevention, and longevity.
• Redesigning food environments, education and public-health policy to favour accessibility and affordability of nutritious, plant-derived foods over animal-based and ultra-processed options.
• Integrating lifestyle-focused education from primary to tertiary level, especially sustainable-diet and exercise principles across school curricula, medical training, and public-health and community outreach.

Benefits of a plant-predominant shift
The IPCC highlights that switching to plant-predominant diets holds “the greatest shift potential” to protect individual and global health, promote human sustainability, mitigate infectious diseases, epidemics/pandemics, resource depletion, etc.:
• Significant health improvements: Evidence strongly associates plant-predominant diets with reduced risks of multiple major diseases. These also support longevity and improve quality of life, potentially preventing millions of premature deaths.
• Lower health-care costs: Prioritizing disease prevention through informed lifestyle choices can significantly reduce the financial burden of national health-care systems worldwide.
• Environmental sustainability: Latest research shows plant-predominant diets generally produce markedly fewer greenhouse-gas emissions, require less land and water, and help safeguard biodiversity.

A unified call to action
The experts urge policymakers, educators and health organisations to work collectively to implement the roadmap’s recommendations, with HEAL as starting point.

“Health is free, but it still has to be earned over a lifetime through informed lifestyle choices on a daily basis. So, why not begin a healthier future this Christmas? Start with a delicious plant-predominant (preferably minimally processed) meal for your loved ones and our planet, and follow it with daily exercise in 2026”, stated lead author, Prof. Katharina Wirnitzer. “Adopting a plant-predominant diet is the easiest and the most powerful change most people can make, to help themselves and the other living creatures with whom we share the Earth”, stated co-author Prof. Andrew Knight.

Katharina C. Wirnitzer
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany
katharina.wirnitzer@charite.de

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