Written for the Good Food Movement as part of my monthly column ‘The Plate and the Planet’. Published in November 2025. Header image credit: Alia Sinha for the Good Food Movement.

On October 2, 2025, the EAT-Lancet Commission, a global consortium of 70 scientists from 35 countries working at the intersection of nutrition, health, and sustainability, released an updated version of its landmark 2019 report, which first introduced the idea of a Planetary Health Diet (PHD). Like many food systems researchers around the world, I have been busy parsing the report and assessing how its updated evidence base reframes global discussions on sustainable and healthy diets. For anyone who has read the 76-page report and its supplements, its scale and scope are immediately evident. It brings together an extraordinary range of evidence across disciplines, leaving much to be discussed. 

In this column, however, I focus on the PHD and explore how the average Indian diet stacks up against its vision for healthy and sustainable eating. The PHD is framed as an optimal diet for improving the wellbeing of the global population and has been developed based on the health impacts of consuming various foods. However, the report provides evidence indicating that the widespread adoption of such a diet can reduce the negative environmental impacts associated with most current diets, making it a means to improve the health of people as well as the planet.

By no means are my observations a report card of the Indian diet, for it remains unclear whether the PHD is entirely suitable for the developing country context (more on that in the last section), but rather an attempt to understand where India’s eating patterns stand in relation to its principles.