EAT-Lancet 2025 Confirms That Australian Consumers Need More Fish—But Only the Truth
The 2025 EAT-Lancet Commission Report on Healthy, Sustainable, and Just Food Systems has delivered its verdict, and the message is crystal clear: to save the planet and protect our health, global diets must be radically transformed, and aquatic foods—our seafood—must be front and centre of that transformation.
For the Seafood Consumers Association (SCA), this landmark report doesn't just offer guidance; it provides the scientific mandate for everything we fight for: transparency, sustainability, and availability.
The Scientific Mandate: We Must Eat More Seafood
The core of the EAT-Lancet findings rests on the Planetary Health Diet (PHD), a flexible, plant-rich framework designed to provide nutritional adequacy within safe environmental boundaries. The report finds that globally, current diets are responsible for ill health and are the single largest contributor to crossing five of the nine planetary boundaries (like biodiversity loss and climate change).
Here is the essential takeaway for every Australian seafood consumer:
The Report recommends a daily intake of sustainably produced fish and seafood ranging from 30 grams up to 100 grams per day.
For the average consumer, 30g is equivalent to about two standard portions of seafood per week—the minimum already recommended by Australian health authorities. The recommendation to safely scale up that consumption to 100g per day (seven portions a week) shows the immense potential and health benefits of aquatic foods compared to land-based animal proteins like red meat, whose consumption must be drastically reduced globally.
Think about how Tapas (Spain) and Sushi/Sashimi (Japan) are not large meals, but they adequately can ensure regular small quantities of seafood are consumed. Note a regular can of Sardines is 125g and that punches way above its weight with all the vitamins, etc you require.
The Health and Planetary Win
The EAT-Lancet Commission explicitly links seafood to:
- Vital Nutrition: Seafood is a critical source of high-quality protein, essential micronutrients, and, most importantly, Omega-3 fatty acids—crucial for brain health, heart health, and child development.
- Lower Environmental Footprint: When produced sustainably, fish and seafood generally have a much lower environmental footprint than land-based animal production, requiring less land, less freshwater, and generating fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
The science could not be clearer: Swapping red meat for sustainable seafood is one of the single most effective ways to improve your health while helping the planet.
The Australian Challenge: Truth, Trust, and Supply
While the global verdict is to increase consumption, the SCA views the EAT-Lancet report as a major challenge to Australian policy, largely because of the critical caveat: the seafood must be produced sustainably and justly.
- The Supply Gap: Australia currently imports over 60-70% of the seafood we eat. The EAT-Lancet report projects that meeting the global demand will require production to expand significantly, primarily through sustainable aquaculture. Yet, our reliance on imports means Australian seafood consumers are NOT food secure, and we are being badly let down by outdated policies.
- The Trust Barrier: The EAT-Lancet vision cannot be realised in Australia if consumers lack confidence. Our own research shows that price and lack of confidence (due to mislabeling) are key barriers to consumption. How can a consumer make the recommended "sustainable choice" if they don't know what species they are eating, whether it was wild harvested or farmed? Meanwhile we continue to promote a Country of Origin and a Packed in Australia policy which is highly flawed.
The SCA’s Path Forward: Demanding Common-Sense Policy
The EAT-Lancet report emphasizes that social justice and affordability are key pillars of the Great Food Transformation. In Australia, that translates into three immediate demands the SCA is now fighting for:
1. Mandatory Fish Naming (Truth First)
The cornerstone of consumer confidence is knowing what you are buying. The EAT-Lancet report’s call for traceability is impossible without a mandatory naming standard.
- The SCA continues to demand that the Australian Fish Names Standard (AFNS) (AS5300) be mandated in the Food Standards Code. This simple change eliminates fraud; allows consumers to know exactly what they are buying and ensures public health via reliable product recalls.
2. Resource Management (Affordable Local Fish)
The EAT-Lancet vision requires a secure, affordable domestic supply. The SCA demands that governments use common sense in resource allocation, acknowledging that uncontrolled predator populations (like the New Zealand and Australian Fur Seals) consume wild fish at rates far exceeding commercial fishing quotas. Managing these populations would directly increase the availability and affordability of local wild-caught species for consumers, aligning our resource management with global food security goals.
3. Investment in Sustainable Supply
We need government and industry to invest in expanding truly sustainable Australian aquaculture—not just for export, but to fill the local market gap with high-quality, traceable seafood, making the healthy, planet-friendly choice the most affordable and available choice for Australian families.
When we heard that CSIRO were spending millions of dollars and years of research on the creation of aquaculture Pompano we queried them about why we would be creating another farmed carnivore species when we could create an aquaculture industry of a new herbivore species. Growing seaweed/sea grass alongside a farmed herbivore fish makes greater sense for the future. That, in our opinion, is the research that should be done. We received no reply!
Currently Biosecurity Australia is leading the way with a plan to insert a virus in our rivers/waterways to attempt to cull European Carp. Again, many millions of dollars have been invested. Could any research guarantee where the virus will end up? If the virus does kill the Carp then the rivers/waterways will be clogged with dead/dying fish and who knows what the outcome will be.
SCA acknowledge that this is an invasive species but to only have one plan which will likely create more problems than it solves is surely not acceptable. Every State/Territory Minister, barring NT, will need to sign off to the virus before it is put into the water. Possibly that ‘sign off’ should have occurred prior to getting this far in the plan because it is hard to believe than any Minister from South Australia would sign off to this having gone through the Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) issues.
There are some simple solutions. Just a look on Facebook will show that Australian Carp Slayers with over 50,000 followers organised with Carp Slayer t-shirts and information on how to catch, kill, process, prepare and eat Carp will show there is a demand. Additionally, the government could address the problem by turning European Carp into a business – they may need to assist with some foundation funds but what an enormous story this would be. A world-class Centre of Excellence for Carp could be created. This could produce all sorts of products – edible and non-edible and even products like protein powders which AusAID could purchase for poor countries ensuring that nothing was wasted and everyone benefits. Hopefully some common sense will start to appear rather than just ‘we know this plan is not going to work but we have come this far’ approach, as we have.
In conclusion the time for voluntary codes and hidden supply chains is over. Transparency must be the focus. The science is in, and it confirms the consumer’s right to know. Join the SCA in demanding the policy overhaul needed to make healthy, sustainable, Australian seafood the cornerstone of our national diet.
