Drawdown Dietetics is inspired by Project Drawdown, a U.S.-based charity that launched in 2017. While we’re not connected to the organization, their evidence, modelling, and approach are all central to our work. Project Drawdown’s latest update this summer included some great new solutions, like Improved Aquaculture. However, they also revised their “Plant-Rich Diets” solution in ways that were extremely frustrating. This new solution includes, for example, a recommendation that we all stick to 2300 calories per day. If you’re a dietitian, it will be obvious why we were so disappointed by this: nutritionally speaking, it’s nonsense.
Individuals all have very different caloric needs, and their needs change throughout life–even day-to-day. Kids need less food than adults, and some adults need more (pregnant people, lactating people, athletes, people recovering from surgery or injury, to name just a few). Saying that everyone should stick to 2300 calories is completely unhelpful, misleading, and not based in science. What’s worse, if a patient said to a dietitian that they were counting calories every day, it could be a red flag for disordered eating. We’re willing to bet that no one—not even the folks at Project Drawdown—is counting calories every day to ensure they’re staying within their quota for climate change. Nor should they! There are much better ways to gauge caloric need: responding to hunger and fullness signals, and when necessary, calculating estimates based on factors like age, activity level, illness, etc.
The other problem is that the updated solution bundles climate action with weight—something we’ve spoken against many times. This bundling risks fatphobia by blaming big bodies for destroying the environment (in addition to all the other things they get blamed for). We believe strongly that shame should not be wielded for the sake of the climate. Consider whether we should go after an athlete for eating 5000 calories every day to maintain their performance level. Should they stop exercising and eating that much for the sake of stopping climate change? We don’t think so.
This leads us to another issue: we question whether calories are meaningfully linked to greenhouse gas emissions at all. Someone eating lots of potato chips could blow past 2300 calories in a day with a very small carbon footprint. On the other hand, someone on a meat-only diet might be eating fewer calories but would have a much bigger climate impact. So this recommendation doesn’t make sense from a nutrition perspective or an emissions reduction perspective. High-calorie diets could be climate-friendly, and low-calorie diets could be very climate-unfriendly.
Lastly, the new plant-rich diet solution recommends local food, which we still have not seen good evidence for (and plenty of evidence against). We continue to recommend against it as an impactful solution. You can read more about why local food will not help mitigate climate change at drawdowndietetics.org/local.
With all of this in mind, we are now rethinking what we share from Project Drawdown. We’ll continue to refer people to their solutions list, and we’ll continue to use the concept of drawdown as a goal-oriented approach to work on climate change. We hope that Project Drawdown reconsiders their approach to dietary solutions, but this is another great example of why dietitians need to be consulted on food-related climate action plans. Everyone has their own strengths and blindspots (including us!), so let’s keep working to help each other do better. We also see this as an excellent push to develop our own practice points and guidelines on what climate-friendly, healthy eating looks like.
We hope you had an excellent summer. Onward!
Anneke and Renita