The compatibility of animal-sourced food and circularity in healthy European diets

Abstract

Several dietary guidelines are developed that propose limiting the intake of animal protein to stay within planetary boundaries and improve human health. Simultaneously, circular food systems are receiving significant attention in the European Union as an option to improve the current food system. In a circular system, animals are solely fed with low-opportunity-cost-biomass (LCB), resulting in substantially fewer animals and reduced supply of animal-sourced nutrients to humans. We assessed whether this circularity principle within the EU-28 is compatible with the recommended animal-source food consumption in healthy and environmentally friendly dietary guidelines such as the EAT-LANCET dietary guidelines. Our results show that the overall quantity of animal-sourced protein in EAT-LANCET dietary guidelines can be met, but that the precise levels of inclusion of different animal-sourced foods in such a diet cannot be achieved. The EAT-LANCET guidelines recommend larger quantities of chicken meat over beef and pork while a circular food system produces mainly milk, dairy-beef, and pork. All three circularity diets outperform the EAT-LANCET diet in nutritional value while reducing GHG emissions (up-to 31%) and arable land use (up-to 42%). Careful consideration of the permissible substitutability between animal-sourced foods is urgently needed to define the role of animal products in circular human diets. In this way the consumption of animal products - based on the circularity principle of only feeding animals with LCB - benefits both human health and the environment.

Why is nutrient cycling in food systems so limited? A case study from the North-Netherlands region

“…The circularity of food systems can be improved by avoiding non-essential products and residual flows of essential products, prioritizing biomass use for human consumption, repurposing residual flows and minimizing energy use (Muscat et al 2021). Applying these principles to the food system of NN could provide benefits to the environment (IFA 2022; Struik and Kuyper 2017) and human health (van Selm et al 2021), but may also have other consequences. First, nutrient inputs would need to be reduced and internal cycling enhanced by limiting the currently large losses and by re-using residual flows.…”

Untapped power of food system by-products to increase global food supply

“…Especially in cattle nutrition, it is possible to construct the diets entirely based on non-foodcompeting feedstuffs even on very high animal production levels, as was demonstrated by Karlsson et al (2018). Thus, this shift in animal diets may favor ruminant based production over monogastric animal based production (van Selm et al, 2021). However, increasing ruminant production will result in increased greenhouse gas emissions, which together with other environmental impacts, should be comprehensively assessed and balanced with other measures, such as changes in diets, when trying to minimize environmental impacts from food production.…”

“…Increasing the use of food system by-products such as crop residues, food processing byproducts, and food waste, has been proposed as a solution to increase the efficient use of resources (van Kernebeek et al, 2016;Schader et al, 2015;Röös et al, 2017;van Hal et al, 2020), to reduce the food-feed competition (van Zanten et al, 2018) and to increase the circularity within food systems (Billen et al, 2021;van Hal et al, 2019). In addition, the use of food system by-products as feed can reduce the agricultural environmental pressure by minimizing environmental impacts such as climate change emissions and the need to occupy inputs such as arable land, fertilizers or water for feed production (van Kernebeek et al 2018;Schader et al, 2015;van Selm et al, 2021;van Hal et al, 2019). Increasing the use of by-products and crop residues as feed can also be cost-effective since they are widely available and low-cost materials (Devendra & Sevilla, 2002).…”