Sustainability in food-based dietary guidelines: a review of recommendations around meat and dairy consumption and their visual representation

Abstract

The transition away from meat and dairy consumption and towards more plant-based diets is vital for meeting environmental sustainability targets, including reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and land use from food. Food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) exist to communicate nutrition information to the public of a country’s population. However, it is not known how different countries’ FBDG communicate reducing meat and dairy intake in the context of sustainability. To address this gap, we reviewed global consumer-facing FBDG (n=58) to explore whether and how recommendations and information around meat and dairy consumption were included, and the pictorial representation of these two groups compared to other foods. Few countries used a sustainability argument to recommend reducing meat (6/58) or dairy consumption (2/58). The proportion of dairy images within food guides was consistently higher than meat images. Some countries’ guidelines are starting to consider meat in the context of sustainability and implementing meat reduction as recommendations. However, this is not the case for dairy, potentially due to complex nutritional implications. Overall, our review shows that not enough countries recommend reducing either meat or dairy consumption. Clearer guidelines backed by current evidence are needed, which provide justification behind recommendations, actionable advice for how to meet the recommendations, and appropriate quantified targets or limits of certain foods. This well-rounded advice is imperative to empower citizens to take action on their dietary habits, to reduce global meat and dairy consumption and replace these with more sustainable alternatives for human and planetary health.

How (not) to talk about plant-based foods: using language to support the transition to sustainable diets

“…This is largely because they do not recommend the reduction of animal-based food consumption, especially beef and dairy (22) . Indeed, most food-based dietary guidelines recommend the consumption of meat and dairy, and only a small number of national guidelines recommend reducing the intake of these foods for reasons of environmental sustainability (23,24) . Although most dietary patterns exceed the recommendations of food-based dietary guidelines and result in higher negative health and environmental impacts (22,25,26) , these guidelines do represent what is deemed 'acceptable' eating behaviour, and they shape social norms that favour omnivorous diets over plantbased or vegetarian diets.…”