(in the words of Frédéric Leroy)

A marketing campaign came out last week from the Changing Markets Foundation. (Henceforth, "the Campaign"). Funding sources for the Campaign were not revealed. In short, the Campaign is an attempt to discredit criticism in advance of the second "Planetary Health Diet" (PHD) report.

in 2019 the EAT-Lancet Commission published its first PHD report, in which they promoted a "flexitarian" diet: essentially a vegan diet with some allowance to be "flexible" rather than strict, such that, for example, you could include about a half of a quarter pound burger a week, and one egg every third day, and still be following their guidelines[1]. This recommendation came with the stated goal of improving human health while ensuring environmental sustainability.

This report was long anticipated, and so as it was coming out, it was heavily criticised and spoken out against by those who think that the scientific evidence does not support the reduction of meat for health of humans or the environment--that EAT-Lancet would in fact be detrimental to human health.

According to the Campaign, there was more social media attention for these criticisms than for the PHD itself! More devastating, some of the same arguments being made in this "backlash" were also used by the Italian ambassador to the UN, helping to persuade the World Health Organization to withdraw sponsorship for an EAT-Lancet launch event.

In the Campaign, the authors try to weave together a story in which

• the fact that people started tweeting about the PHD in the days before its release indicated some kind of special knowledge, despite months of announcements, press releases, and early coverage;
• the quick rallying and spread of memes and hashtags among already connected accounts on Twitter and their followers somehow implies great efforts of coordination, rather than being exactly how decentralised networks naturally work;
• the most prolific and influential people speaking out against the PHD must be bought by the industry; despite the arguments themselves having merit.

"Types of narrative likely to be used against EAT-Lancet 2.0"

After nearly twenty pages of profiling the various people most active in drawing attention to arguments against the PHD, and various guilt by association analysis, the authors finally get to something really useful! What should someone be on the lookout for if searching for "misinformation" targeted against EAT-Lancet?

On page 60 we are presented with a graphic depicting 7 different ways the PHD might be criticised.

Let's take a look!

Personally, I find this inspiring.

This list includes many reasons EAT-Lancet fails in its goals. In fact, I think if we would like to prevent misguided policies from being adopted to the detriment of many humans, we should centre our efforts on most of these blocks and pose these very questions, and let the evidence in the scientific literature speak for itself.

Are animal-based food products essential to good health?

Are animal-based food products environmentally friendly compared to plant-based food products?

Does culture point to any valid reasons for meat eating or can we just discard the worldwide repositories of cultural knowledge as outdated?

Is the EAT-Lancet diet in practice likely to be nutritionally deficient and disease promoting?

But it also drips with irony!

Two of the sections ask us to watch for the disparaging tactics of:

• discredit scientific foundations by targeting authors, accusing them of ideological bias, conflicts of interest, and poor methodology.
• present opposing view as a coordinated campaign by elites to control diets, restrict choice, and profit from food markets.

In other words, they warn that we might do what the entire Campaign spends all of its 60+ pages doing.

Notice what they do not do.

Actually address any of the important questions about the proposal.

Simply put, The Campaign is a Smear Campaign. It is not scientific, it is political.

1 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext