Is the Sustainable Choice a Healthy Choice?—Water Footprint Consequence of Changing Dietary Patterns

Abstract

It is evident that the modification of dietary patterns is a necessary precondition of disease prevention and health improvement. Changing nutritional habits also has deep-rooted consequences on the environmental burden. The majority of similar previous studies have analyzed the change in greenhouse gas emissions against theoretical modifications in current food consumption. The analysis on the effect of diet on the water footprint is also gaining in importance, since water supply is a critical global issue. Based on current nutritional patterns of a Central European country—Hungary—as well as dietary recommendations and scientific literature, we generated six dietary scenarios and determined the consequences of these on green (originally from precipitation) and blue (sourced from surface or groundwater) water consumption and dietary quality. Compared to the baseline scenario (current local nutritional pattern) of both genders, based on the integrated aspect of water footprint and dietary quality, the most disadvantageous scenario was the ketogenic (ca. −2% in dietary quality, +18% in blue water footprint, and +16% in green water footprint) and the most advantageous was the sustainable scenario (ca. +9% in dietary quality, −42% in green water footprint, and −29% in blue water footprint). As a summary it can be stated, that (1) there is no clear linear relationship between the “healthiness” and water footprint of different diets, but (2) a more balanced diet, which integrates nutritional and environmental considerations could decrease the environmental burden in an efficient way.

Sustainable Diet Optimization Targeting Dietary Water Footprint Reduction—A Country-Specific Study

“…There is no clear agreement on the association of healthiness and the environmental impact of diets in general [9,15,[51][52][53][54], but the synergy between a healthier diet and a lower dietary footprint does exist. This has also proven true for the dietary water footprint by this and numerous other studies analyzing the shift between the observed and healthier diets [9,[18][19][20]35,41,[55][56][57]. However, this association is neither linear nor general, which is also well presented in this study.…”

Why Not Green Marketing? Determinates of Consumers’ Intention to Green Purchase Decision in a New Developing Nation

“…According to Bickart and Ruth, "environmental concern can be defining consumers' appearance of problems about the importance of the environment for the benefits in the welfare of the nation [67]". Customers who are worried about environmental issues are positive about green products and highly motivated to buy eco-friendly products to maintain a good healthy lifestyle [68][69][70]. Earlier scholars found in their study that environmental concern affects the consumer's purchasing decision process, especially for green products [17,23,61,71,72].…”

Water Resources for Sustainable Healthy Diets: State of the Art and Outlook

“…Dietary WF assessments have been conducted at global level [48,49], at national level with global coverage [50,51], continental or regional scale [45,52], individual country level [53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63], river basin level [64], provincial level [61], city level up to inner-city/borough level [34,[65][66][67][68][69][70][71] and for specific socioeconomic groups [65,[72][73][74]. Harris et al [33] also provide a selected overview of relevant studies.…”