Decreasing the overall environmental impact of the Dutch diet: how to find healthy and sustainable diets with limited changes

Kramer, G.F.H.; Tyszler, Marcelo; Veer, P. van ‘t; Blonk, Hans

doi:10.1017/s1368980017000349

Cited by 61 publications

(83 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…In France, GHGEs could be reduced by 30% at no extra cost while still fulfilling food-habit and nutritional constraints and without a major departure from the average observed diet ( 26 ). A similar threshold of environmental impact reduction (30%) was identified among Dutch adults by imposing a stepwise reduction of a global environmental metric taking into account GHGEs, fossil-energy use, and land occupation ( 101 ). However, diet cost was not considered ( 101 ).…”

Section: Environmentally Friendly Dietsmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…A similar threshold of environmental impact reduction (30%) was identified among Dutch adults by imposing a stepwise reduction of a global environmental metric taking into account GHGEs, fossil-energy use, and land occupation ( 101 ). However, diet cost was not considered ( 101 ). In the United Kingdom, GHGEs could be reduced progressively by ≤40% without any major changes in the average observed diet among both men and women.…”

Section: Environmentally Friendly Dietsmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…The environmental target imposed in the studies described above may not be the best tradeoff between all diet sustainability dimensions. The best threshold of environmental impact reduction compatible with other diet sustainability dimensions has been identified in models imposing stepwise reductions (until infeasibility) of diet environmental impact while staying as close as possible to the average observed diet and meeting nutrient recommendations ( 26 , 97 , 101–103 ). This approach is able to pinpoint the level of environmental impact reduction for which the optimized diet deviates too far from the observed diet.…”

Section: Environmentally Friendly Dietsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Mathematical Optimization to Explore Tomorrow's Sustainable Diets: A Narrative Review

Gazan

Brouzes

Vieux

et al. 2018

Advances in Nutrition

128

134

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A sustainable diet is, by definition, nutritionally adequate, economically affordable, culturally acceptable, and environmentally respectful. Designing such a diet has to integrate different dimensions of diet sustainability that may not be compatible with each other. Among multicriteria assessment methods, diet optimization is a whole-diet approach that simultaneously combines several metrics for dimensions of diet sustainability. This narrative review based on 67 published studies shows how mathematical diet optimization can help with understanding the relations between the different dimensions of diet sustainability and how it can be properly used to identify sustainable diets. Diet optimization aims to find the optimal combination of foods for a population, a subpopulation, or an individual that fulfills a set of constraints while minimizing or maximizing an objective function. In the studies reviewed, diet optimization was used to examine the links between dimensions of diet sustainability, identify the minimum cost or environmental impact of a nutritionally adequate diet, or identify food combinations able to combine ≥2 sustainability dimensions. If some constraints prove difficult to fulfill, this signals an incompatibility between nutrient recommendations, over-monotonous food-consumption patterns, an inadequate supply of nutrient-rich foods, or an incompatibility with other dimensions. If diet optimization proves successful, it can serve to design nutritionally adequate, culturally acceptable, economically affordable, and environmentally friendly diets. Diet optimization results can help define dietary recommendations, tackle food security issues, and promote sustainable dietary patterns. This review emphasizes the importance of carefully choosing the model parameters (variables, objective function, constraints) and input data and the need for appropriate expertise to correctly interpret and communicate the results. Future research should make improvements in the choice of metrics used to assess each aspect of a sustainable diet, especially the cultural dimension, to improve the practicability of the results.

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Section: Environmentally Friendly Dietsmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Environmentally Friendly Dietsmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Environmentally Friendly Dietsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Mathematical Optimization to Explore Tomorrow's Sustainable Diets: A Narrative Review

Gazan

Brouzes

Vieux

et al. 2018

Advances in Nutrition

128

134

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Finally, we computed for each a partial ReCiPe (pReCiPe) score, including the greenhouse gas emissions, primary energy consumption and land occupation relative to the food production. This score reflects the environmental impacts of food production and is computed as following (23) : pReCiPe = 0•0459 × greenhouse gas emissions (in kg CO 2eq /kg) + 0•0025 × primary energy consumption (in MJ/kg) + 0•0439 × land occupation (in m 2 /kg).…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development and validation of an individual sustainable diet index in the NutriNet-Santé study cohort

et al. 2019

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In the current context of unsustainable food systems, we aimed to develop and validate an index, the sustainable diet index (SDI), assessing the sustainability of dietary patterns, including multidimensional individual indicators of sustainability. Based on the FAO’s definition of sustainable diets, the SDI includes seven indicators categorised into four standardised sub-indexes, respectively, environmental, nutritional, economic and sociocultural. The index (range: 4–20) was obtained by summing the sub-indexes. We computed the SDI for 29 388 participants in the NutriNet-Santé cohort study, estimated its validity and identified potential socio-demographic or lifestyle differences across the SDI quintile. In our sample, the SDI (mean=12·10/20; 95 % CI 12·07, 12·13) was highly correlated to all the sub-indexes that exerted substantial influence on the participants’ ranking. The environmental and economical sub-indexes were the most and less correlated with the SDI (Pearson R2 0·66 and 0·52, respectively). Dietary patterns of participants with a high SDI (considered as more sustainable) were concordant with the already published sustainable diets. Participants with high SDI scores were more often women (24 %), post-secondary graduates (22 %) and vegetarians or vegans (7 %), without obesity (16 %). Finally, the SDI could be a useful tool to easily assess the sustainability-related changes in dietary patterns, estimate the association with long-term health outcomes and help guide future public health policies.

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“…This study on fish intake assessed the nutrition/health, the economic/affordability and the cultural acceptability dimensions of diet sustainability. Several diet optimisation studies have analysed the environmental dimension when generating sustainable diets (18,(39)(40)(41)(42) , by including one or more environmental metrics such as greenhouse gas emissions, land use and fossil use. Our model could in a future study, in line with the developments of the FBDG and the focus on sustainable fish species, be modified to include some environmental metric.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimising healthy and safe fish intake recommendations: a trade-off between personal preference and cost

2019

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Individuals may perceive personalised dietary advice as more relevant and motivational than national guidelines. Personal preference and food cost are factors that can affect consumer decisions. The objective of this study was to present a method for modelling and analysing the trade-off between deviation from preference and food cost for optimised personalised dietary recommendations. Quadratic programming was applied to minimise deviation from fish preference and cost simultaneously with different weights on the cost for 3016 Danish adults (whose dietary intake and body weight were recorded in a national dietary survey). Model constraints included recommendations for EPA, DHA and vitamin D and tolerable levels for methyl mercury, dioxins and dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls. When only minimising deviation from preference, 50 % of the study population should be recommended to increase fish intake, 48 % should be suggested to maintain current consumption and 2 % should be suggested to decrease fish consumption. When only minimising cost, the vast majority (99 %) should be recommended to only consume herring, which is the least-expensive fish species. By minimising deviation from preference and cost simultaneously with different weights on the cost, personalised optimal trade-off curves between deviation from fish intake preference and fish cost could be generated for each individual in our study population, except for twenty-two individuals (0·7 %) whose contaminant background exposure was too high. In the future, the method of this paper could be applied in the personal communication of healthy and safe food recommendations that fit the preferences of individual consumers.

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Decreasing the overall environmental impact of the Dutch diet: how to find healthy and sustainable diets with limited changes

Cited by 61 publications

References 30 publications

Mathematical Optimization to Explore Tomorrow's Sustainable Diets: A Narrative Review

Mathematical Optimization to Explore Tomorrow's Sustainable Diets: A Narrative Review

Development and validation of an individual sustainable diet index in the NutriNet-Santé study cohort

Optimising healthy and safe fish intake recommendations: a trade-off between personal preference and cost

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