Fig. 4: The extinction impacts of average daily per capita food consumption in the United States for consumption in 2021, the EAT–Lancet planetary health diet and hypothetical vegetarian and vegan diets.

Table 1 provides a detailed breakdown of commodities in each diet. Baseline intake values are taken from FAO data²⁷. The intake of spices, coffee, cocoa, tea and maté remains constant across diets. The EAT–Lancet diet is the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, designed to be consistent with health requirements and planetary boundaries⁵¹. The vegetarian and vegan diets are based on ‘Eatwell’ plates, with constituent commodities consumed in the same ratios that they currently are within each group^53,54,55,56. Each reference diet is scaled to have the same number of calories as the baseline, which in theory accounts for food waste and overconsumption, probably overestimating their impacts.