Moving to a Plant-Based Diet Could Save Lives from Pandemics, Climate Change, and the Global Burden of Diet-Related Disease

The global shutdown of entire cities, states, and countries, and the commensurate financial fallout from COVID-19 should serve to focus our collective efforts on primary prevention of global health pandemics. COVID-19 appears to have zoonotic origins, and the evidence suggests that most viruses have zoonotic origins. Therefore, public health policy must focus on reducing animal to human transmission. Although we are currently embroiled in the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also facing other global demands on our health systems from climate change, which kills approximately 150,000 people each year, and the global burden of disease from diet, which has been linked to 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Public policies to incentivize plant-based diets may have seemed infeasible in the past. However, the recent human and financial toll of the COVID-19 pandemic and commensurate planetary, community, and individual health benefits of reducing animal consumption strongly argue for greater attention by global leaders and should inspire global change toward primary prevention of global challenges that will benefit our health, the environment, and greatly reduce the occurrence of future pandemics.