Comparing environmental and personal health impacts of individual food choices

Walker, Christie; Gibney, Eileen R.; Mathers, John C.; Hellweg, Stefanie

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.05.404

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…It cannot be denied, however, that an overconsumption of meat is detrimental for our environment (e.g. Walker et al, 2019), and the health of human individuals, men in particular (Nakagawa & Hart, 2019). Some studies pointed to the fact that men are hard to convince to eat less meat, because of their fear to face identity issues (Rothgerber, 2013), but again, our study shows that this may not be true for all men.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

Meat and masculinities. Can differences in masculinity predict meat consumption, intentions to reduce meat and attitudes towards vegetarians?

et al. 2020

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 55%

Meat and masculinities. Can differences in masculinity predict meat consumption, intentions to reduce meat and attitudes towards vegetarians?

et al. 2020

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“…It was also removed in Scenario 10 to observe how the diet composition would change without this constraint. This was done for several reasons; it has been found that meeting the minimum GBD milk recommendation only slightly lowers disease risk and is a large source of dietary impacts (Walker et al., 2019), as well as the fact that in many cultures, milk consumption can be quite limited. As these issues are not found for other GBD dietary recommendations, further sensitivities to other GBD risk factors were not evaluated.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methodology and optimization tool for a personalized low environmental impact and healthful diet specific to country and season

Walker

Pfister

Hellweg

2021

J of Industrial Ecology

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To remain within the limits of the planetary boundaries and address increasing disease rates due to poor eating habits, there needs to be a major shift in dietary patterns. The composition of an optimal diet changes depending on location, season, and personalized dietary needs. We develop a methodology to build a 500+ food item, nutrient, and environmental impact database specific to a given country and month, which includes several life cycle stages of a food item and calculates impacts depending on from where the item is sourced. This database is then used to develop a detailed and personalized, healthful, low impact diet by using linear optimization. We applied this methodology to several case studies to compare what low impact diets would look like depending on country (Switzerland vs. Spain), season (August vs. February), sex, the inclusion of dietary supplements, and for different diet types and impact categories (climate change and biodiversity loss). Results indicate that, although optimized diets are similar, there are marked differences in the detailed composition depending on country, season, and impact considered, especially regarding legume choice. The lowest impact diet contained local and imported foods as well as fish. Vegan diets had the lowest impact only when incorporating a supplement to meet nutrient needs. We developed a tool to be used for personalized diet composition assessments for any global geographical location and season. We anticipate this work to be useful for developing countryand season-specific dietary guidelines and for consumers hoping to reduce their own personal impacts. K E Y W O R D Sbiodiversity loss, climate change, diet and health, environmental impact, industrial ecology, optimization INTRODUCTIONFood systems are directly linked to current or future exceedances of many of the planetary boundaries . Combined with changing food demands toward higher meat intake, impacts will increase rather than decrease to the necessary levels to remain within the boundaries.These challenges are compounded by the fact that current consumption patterns are also leading to higher rates of diet related diseases Popkin et al., 2006;Kearney, 2010), with the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) estimating that one in five deaths globally are associated with a poor diet (Afshin et al., 2019). Efforts to link and ultimately reduce both environmental impacts and dietary related disease risk have

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“…Assessing indicators that provide unique information helps to identify trade-offs and rebound effects of food consumption choices, and of the encouragement of such choices through policy instruments (Masset et al, 2015;Saarinen et al, 2017;Walker et al, 2019). The high positive correlation between NRF24 and GWP (r = 0.69) suggests that food items with a higher nutrient density have a higher global warming potential (Figure 3).…”

Section: Identifying Trade-offs In Healthy and Sustainable Food Consu...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The complementarity of nutrient density and disease burden for Nutritional Life Cycle Assessment

Cardinaals,

Verly,

Jolliet

et al. 2024

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

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The triple burden of obesity, undernutrition and climate change calls for systemic action to find solutions that co-benefit human and planetary health. A Nutritional Life Cycle Assessment (nLCA) can be used as a tool to assess the health- and environmental impact of foods and guide a transition to healthy and sustainable diets. Thus far, nLCAs have used the nutrient content of foods to represent their health impact, whereas the disease risk linked to under- or overconsuming certain nutrients, foods or food groups has been largely underutilized. This study explored, for the Dutch diet, the correlation between an indicator for essential nutrient density and for the disease burden of individual food items, i.e., a Nutrient Rich Food index with 24 essential nutrients (NRF24) and the HEalth Nutritional Index (HENI), respectively. NRF24 and HENI scores were calculated for food items contained in the Dutch Food Composition database. A very weak correlation between NRF24 and HENI values confirmed that nutrient density and disease burden should be considered as complementary and thus, that a high nutrient density does not directly imply a low disease burden, and vice versa. Moreover, the direction and strength of the correlation was food group-dependent, with negative correlations between NRF24 and HENI mainly observed for animal-based products, with the exception of dairy. In addition, the correlations between the nutrition-based indicators and indicators for greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water use were mostly weak, which stresses the need to include health impact in traditional LCAs because foods with a high nutrient density and low disease burden can imply trade-offs due to high environmental impacts. We therefore conclude that multiple indicators for health and environmental impact should be considered side-by-side in nLCA to avoid the risk of missing important information and trade-offs when assessing the performance of individual food items for healthy and sustainable diets.

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Comparing environmental and personal health impacts of individual food choices

Cited by 18 publications

References 42 publications

Meat and masculinities. Can differences in masculinity predict meat consumption, intentions to reduce meat and attitudes towards vegetarians?

Meat and masculinities. Can differences in masculinity predict meat consumption, intentions to reduce meat and attitudes towards vegetarians?

Methodology and optimization tool for a personalized low environmental impact and healthful diet specific to country and season

The complementarity of nutrient density and disease burden for Nutritional Life Cycle Assessment

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