Data Integration for Diet Sustainability Analyses

Abstract

Diet sustainability analyses are stronger when they incorporate multiple food systems domains, disciplines, scales, and time/space dimensions into a common modeling framework. Few analyses do this well: there are large gaps in food systems data in many regions, accessing private and some public data can be difficult, and there are analytical challenges, such as creating linkages across datasets and using complex analytical methods. This article summarizes key data sources across multiple domains of food system sustainability (nutrition, economic, environment) and describes methods and tools for integrating them into a common analytic framework. Our focus is the United States because of the large number of publicly available and highly disaggregated datasets. Thematically, we focus on linkages that exist between environmental and economic datasets to nutrition, which can be used to estimate the cost and agricultural resource use of food waste, interrelationships between healthy eating and climate impacts, diets optimized for cost, nutrition, and environmental impacts, and others. The limitations of these approaches and data sources are described next. By enhancing data integration across these fields, researchers can be better equipped to promote policy for sustainable diets.

Measurement of diets that are healthy, environmentally sustainable, affordable, and equitable: A scoping review of metrics, findings, and research gaps

“…Indeed, there is often a lack of transparency about elements that are not included in analytical frameworks. This can be seen in how emission estimates often do not include activities beyond the farm, most notably transportation ( 64 ). Such system boundaries inevitably impact results of studies.…”

Diet Sustainability Analyses Can Be Improved With Updates to the Food Commodity Intake Database

“…Others ( 11 ) have used the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) ( 36 ) and Food Patterns Equivalents Database (FPED) ( 37 ) to disaggregate NHANES foods for diet sustainability analyses, but these databases do not account for food waste which represents ~30% (by weight) of food available for consumption ( 26 ), and will underestimate the associated sustainability outcomes. By contrast, FCID is the only food composition database that disaggregates NHANES mixed dishes into ingredients that map onto agricultural commodities, which can then be linked with data on food waste from the Loss-adjusted Food Availability data series ( 38 ), as described elsewhere ( 9 ). These linked FCID-LAFA data can be used to evaluate the association between food waste and multiple indicators of sustainability, including agricultural resource use ( 26 , 27 ), environmental impacts ( 25 ), diet quality ( 26 , 27 ), and consumer food expenditures ( 28 , 29 ).…”

“…NHANES is the backbone of diet sustainability analyses in the US because it is the richest source of nationally representative dietary data. Survey respondents typically report consumption of mixed dishes that contain multiple ingredients, so food composition databases are used to quantify these ingredients, which provides a crosswalk to environmental and economic databases (9). Key among these food composition databases is the Food Commodity Intake Database (FCID), which disaggregates NHANES foods into nearly 500 highly differentiated ingredients and has been used to evaluate dietary intake (12)(13)(14)(15)(16), chemical exposure (17)(18)(19)(20), environmental impacts (7,(21)(22)(23)(24)(25), agricultural resource use (26,27), and food expenditures (28,29).…”

“…Although most diet sustainability analyses have been conducted using data collected from other countries, the number of studies conducted using US-based data has increased ( 1 ) as data integration methods have improved ( 9 ). For example, Canning et al ( 10 ) combined dietary data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) with an environmentally-extended economic model and a biophysical model and found that food demand in the US accounted for 28% of freshwater withdrawals, 25% of total land area, 18% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), but only 8.6% of gross domestic product (GDP).…”

Visualizing Data Interoperability for Food Systems Sustainability Research—From Spider Webs to Neural Networks

“…Ongoing diet sustainability analyses [ 5 ] have pointed to interactions and tradeoffs among the 4 food systems domains of nutrition and health, economics, society, and the environment. Diet sustainability analyses employ metrics and measures from multiple domains that are context specific and operate across space and time [ 5 , 6 ]. The goal of such analyses is to identify dietary patterns that respect planetary boundaries while assuring affordable food and nutrition security for all [ 4 ].…”