Our food production model drives unhealthy choices leading to poor diets. This becomes clear when walking down any supermarket aisle: the shelves are filled with over-packaged food imported from all over the world and look the same whatever the season. Even when people would prefer to eat well, many barriers can hinder their ability to access and consume a healthy diet, including, the greater availability and promotion of nutritionally poor industrial food in shops and in schools, misleading labeling and advertisements, and price.

On World Health Day, we must remember that our health is intrinsically tied to that of animals, plants, and the planet. What we eat impacts everything around us.

In our new position paper “Our food, our health: a healthy food system for the European Union”, we define a healthy diet as one that promotes human health and respects that of the planet, favoring a wide variety of foods of plant origin, whole foods, and minimally processed foods, produced locally using sustainable methods. But consumers alone cannot turn the tables: for a sustainable food system to prevail, policymakers must take a “food environments approach” that recognizes that the most effective and equitable way to change food behaviors is to change the structural factors that drive food choices.