Evaluating the environmental impacts of dietary recommendations

Paul Behrens, Jessica C Kiefte-de Jong, Thijs Bosker, João F D Rodrigues, Arjan de Koning, Arnold Tukker, Paul Behrens, Jessica C Kiefte-de Jong, Thijs Bosker, João F D Rodrigues, Arjan de Koning, Arnold Tukker

Abstract

Dietary choices drive both health and environmental outcomes. Information on diets come from many sources, with nationally recommended diets (NRDs) by governmental or similar advisory bodies the most authoritative. Little or no attention is placed on the environmental impacts within NRDs. Here we quantify the impact of nation-specific NRDs, compared with an average diet in 37 nations, representing 64% of global population. We focus on greenhouse gases (GHGs), eutrophication, and land use because these have impacts reaching or exceeding planetary boundaries. We show that compared with average diets, NRDs in high-income nations are associated with reductions in GHG, eutrophication, and land use from 13.0 to 24.8%, 9.8 to 21.3%, and 5.7 to 17.6%, respectively. In upper-middle-income nations, NRDs are associated with slight decrease in impacts of 0.8-12.2%, 7.7-19.4%, and 7.2-18.6%. In poorer middle-income nations, impacts increase by 12.4-17.0%, 24.5-31.9%, and 8.8-14.8%. The reduced environmental impact in high-income countries is driven by reductions in calories (∼54% of effect) and a change in composition (∼46%). The increased environmental impacts of NRDs in low- and middle-income nations are associated with increased intake in animal products. Uniform adoption of NRDs across these nations would result in reductions of 0.19-0.53 Gt CO2 eq⋅a-1, 4.32-10.6 Gt [Formula: see text] eq⋅a-1, and 1.5-2.8 million km2, while providing the health cobenefits of adopting an NRD. As a small number of dietary guidelines are beginning to incorporate more general environmental concerns, we anticipate that this work will provide a standardized baseline for future work to optimize recommended diets further.

Keywords: MRIO; dietary change; environmental impacts; sustainable diets.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Copyright © 2017 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Overview of the composition of energy intake by food category per person per day for national average diets, national recommended diets, and the difference between them, for all countries in this study. Notice that NRDs have been scaled so that total calorie intake matches that of the average diet (isocaloric approach). Although the proportion of grains for Hungary, Latvia, and Portugal may seem large, these are the recommendations (Supporting Information).
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
(A) Absolute environmental impacts of average diets for different national income groups per person. (B) Differences in environmental impacts between average and recommended diets per person. Net change and change by food group are shown. Both panels give GHG and eutrophication emissions in terms of per day and land use in ongoing, yearly requirement. Land use in Australia has been truncated in both panels for ease of visualization (in A, total Australian land use is 3.3 ha; in B the change is a reduction of 1.0 ha).
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Relative differences in environmental impacts between nationally recommended and average diets for high-income and lower-income nations. Red line indicates median relative difference; left and right box limits show first and third quartiles, respectively; whiskers show range from minimum to maximum; and blue crosses show the mean, population-weighted impact.

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