Abstract for: No milk without meat: Dynamic implications of the biological link between milk & bovine meat production on nutrition guidelines

The EAT–Lancet Commission report on healthy diets from sustainable food systems calls for a “great food transformation”. This planetary-health-diet (PHD) ensures healthy intake levels across food groups and keeps environmental impacts within planetary boundaries. Countries must review their nutrition recommendations and operationalize the PHD to national contexts. But what are the pitfalls of this adaptation? Sustainability assessment approaches can guide this adaptation. This focus on empirical data is short-sighted, not least because bovine meat and milk production are biologically linked. The PHD considers this biological link, but many national health recommendations do not. We argue that policymakers must consider this biological link in operationalizing the PHD. We explore the impact of dietary scenarios on milk and bovine meat production with a simple computer simulation model. We review current national nutrition recommendations in Europe for coherence regarding the milk–bovine meat biological link, and their compatibility with the PHD.