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So it's my pleasure to introduce doctor. She, she's a consultant hematologist in London. Bye, everyone at the back. Sorry, we just want to get the next, feel free to keep grabbing a coffee. But if we can just pick up our conversations at lunch, sorry, we'll run out of time. And so doctor Sam is a consultant hematologist, a certified lifestyle medicine physician and she's also visiting professor of plant based nutrition. Um and she's based in London. She founded um plant based Health professionals UK. It's a community interest company that provides education on healthy plant based diets and lifestyle medicine. And she's also written two books on the topic and it is my absolute pleasure to welcome her here to talk to us. Um She's incredibly knowledgeable on the topic and has lots of tips um on how we can eat sustainably and healthily. Um So over to you. Thank you. Brilliant. Um Thanks Becca for the invitation and thanks everyone for attending today. It's really always a pleasure to talk about my favorite topic. Um, plant based diets focusing in on the health and environmental benefits. Um So you've heard a little bit about me. I'm also the sustainability lead for the um Royal College of Pathologists for Pathology Practice. Um And I'll come back to some of the resources that you can use from my organization plant based health professionals at the end, if you're keen to learn more. Um So why are we talking about food? I hope this is now self evident because um food and the climate crisis um is really interlinked. But I think we failed to really grasp the real impact of the food system in the UK and globally on all of these interrelated crises. So health climate breakdown by diversity loss, driver of antibiotic resistance and pandemic risk, air pollution that's not often talked about. And also it's an issue of social justice. You know, it, for me, it's um really hugely an unjust situation where we produce enough food globally to feed 10 billion people. Yet nearly a billion are still remaining in hunger. And at the same time, we slaughter 80 billion land animal and two trillion fishes every year for foods that I will hopefully persuade you are not necessary and we can make better um more just um choices for humans and the animals. So I'm really going to stick to um health and the environmental arguments for shifting our food system and diet patterns. And really of, of course, you know, within a hospital setting, we can't fail to acknowledge the impact of our diet on health of our, the individuals, our patients and the population at um at large. So unhealthy diets are now responsible for a quarter of premature deaths globally. And in Europe, around a third of premature deaths are due to dietary risk factors. Um And as I've mentioned, all forms of sort of malnutrition, hunger to obesity are rising despite the ability to feed everybody a healthy diet. Um and there's been a, a new report from the UK just at the start of this year from the Food Farming and Countryside Commission that really put a cost to the NHS and the wider economy of our unhealthy food environment. And that cost was 206 68 billion lbs in both sort of direct and indirect impacts to health and the cost to sort of health care, social and wealth, fair care and the loss of productivity. And that number you'll recognize is is larger than the budget of the NHS every year. So why are our diet so unhealthy? Well, an analysis from two hun uh 2019 analyzed 100 and 95 regions around the world and asked the question, what are the key dietary risk factors that are leading to this chronic ill health? Um And what the um analysis found was that in 2019, um unhealthy diets were responsible for one in five premature deaths and were the leading cause of chronic ill health um causing more ill health and premature deaths than um tobacco and alcohol consumption combined. And in the right hand side, you'll see a table which lists the top dietary risk factors. Firstly, it's the diet high in sodium, which is a reflection of our reliance on people f and packaged foods. But beyond that, it's because we're not consuming enough of the fiber rich plant foods, the fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds, and this sort of over consumption of processed foods and huge underconsumption of um healthy plant foods is leading to excess deaths from cardiovascular disease, cancer and type two diabetes. And this was regardless of where the analysis was conducted in the world, so very relevant with the UK as well. Um And they put a figure on the number of premature deaths at that time that were caused by dietary risk factors and it's around 12 million premature deaths. Um and this is also contributing to the fact that um the gap between our life expectancy and our healthy life expectancy is widening. And again, a very recent paper from just earlier this year in Jama, um demonstrating that the gap between lifespan and health span widens and in the UK, it's 11.3 years. So we're spending over a decade in in ill health before we die. And that impact is obviously greater in people from lower socioeconomic groups with that sort of gap between lifespan and health span being up to 20 years. Um So when it comes to what um is a healthy diet pattern. There's different ways of putting together a healthy diet pattern, but they all conform to the same principle. So it doesn't matter what you call them. And there's a list of healthy dietary patterns that have been studied extensively in the medical literature. But you can see here that at the base of the pyramid, what we should be doing every day is all the healthy habits. So I love that it's physical activity, spending time in nature, spending time with family and including um our companion animals. But really, we should be focusing in on um drinking healthy um beverages, mainly water for thirst, tea, and coffee if you enjoy it. And then focusing in on the healthy foods that I've mentioned already. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds, everything else is optional and limited. So optional. You can add in some fish and um dairy um and limited would be other animal source foods, ultra processed foods and, and snack foods. Um And so there's different ways of putting this um type of diet together that can be very culturally and traditionally um appropriate. Um And I'm also certified as a lifestyle medicine physician. Um that brings together the concept of using um lifestyle interventions in the therapeutic setting to prevent and um manage and in some cases reverse chronic diseases. Um And here, the founding College, American College of Lifestyle Medicine has put together a position statement on what constitutes a healthy diet. And you can see um it depicted in the plate here. It's what I described already. Half the plate fruits and vegetables. Um quarter of the plate whole grains, um and a quarter plant sources of protein. So from lentils, beans, chickpeas, soy foods, nuts and seeds. Um And as I say, what you do around the edges is, is, is a personal individual choice. But the diet should be pretty much composed around this. Lots of herbs and spices because they're delicious, but also because they have healthy properties and mainly water for thirst. So I'm just going to move on briefly now to the environmental impacts of our food system. Again, it's not really a good news story here either. We know that the global food system in its entirety is a key contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. More than 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the food sector. But over half of this is from animal agriculture. It's an enormous use of land, fresh water. It's a major cause of eutr due to pollution of fresh water and oceans from farm waste and also fertilizers. And also it's the leading cause of biodiversity loss of mammals and of, of birds. And we are one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. When we focus in on the UK, the food system accounts for around 1/5 of greenhouse gas emissions. But if you count the foods that we also import to the country then that rises to around 30% of all emissions. Um, but what's, um, quite alarming is that the production of red meat and dairy, um, leads to more than 70% of our farming emissions. So, if we think about what we might be able to do to reduce farming emissions, it's quite clear what we do need to focus in, um, is, is around our consumption of red meat and, and dairy. Um and land use is a problem as well. Um In the UK, 70% of our land is devoted to agriculture, but over 80% of that land is used to raise animals for food, whether it's to graze animals or to grow crops for animals to consume. But not only that you can see this is from the National Food Strategy report that we use the same amount of land again overseas to be um producing this food, mainly animal source foods, which produce only 32% of our calories and globally only 18% of calories. So it's hugely inefficient because that conversion of feeding crops to animals to then using the animals for calories and protein is.