• Energy Research

Food systems that deliver healthy diets without exceeding the planet’s resources are essential to achieve the worlds’ ambitious development goals. Healthy diets need to be safe, accessible, and affordable for all, including for disadvantaged and nutritionally vulnerable groups such as of smallholder producers, traders, and consumers in low- and middle-income countries. Globally, food systems are experiencing rapid and drastic changes and are failing to fulfil these multiple duties simultaneously. The international community therefore calls for rigorous food systems transformations and policy solutions to support the achievement of healthy diets for all. Most strategies, however, are essentially supply- and market-oriented. Incorporation of a healthy diet perspective in food system transformation is essential to enable food systems to deliver not only on supplying nutritious foods but also on ensuring that consumers have access can afford and desire healthy, sustainable, and culturally acceptable diets. This paper argues that this should be guided by information on diets, dietary trends, consumer motives, and food environment characteristics. Transformational approaches and policies should also take into account the stage of food system development requiring different strategies to ensure healthier diets for consumers. We review current knowledge on drivers of consumer choices at the individual and food environment level with special emphasis on low- and middle income countries, discuss the converging and conflicting objectives that exist among multiple food-system actors, and argue that failure to strengthen synergies and resolve trade-offs may lead to missed opportunities and benefits, or negative unintended consequences in food system outcomes. The paper proposes a menu of promising consumer- and food-environment- oriented policy options to include in the food systems transformation agenda in order to shift LMIC consumer demand towards healthier diets in low- and middle income countries.

AbstractIt is not known whether dietary guidelines proposing a limited intake of animal protein are compatible with the adoption of circular food systems. Using a resource-allocation model, we compared the effects of circularity on the supply of animal-source nutrients in Europe with the nutritional requirements of the EAT-Lancet reference diet. We found the two to be compatible in terms of total animal-source proteins but not specific animal-source foods; in particular, the EAT-Lancet guidelines recommend larger quantities of poultry meat over beef and pork, while a circular food system produces mainly milk, dairy-beef and pork. Compared with the EAT-Lancet reference diet, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by up to 31% and arable land use reduced by up to 42%. Careful consideration of the feasible substitutability between animal-source foods is needed to define potential roles of animal products in circular human diets.

Promoting both a healthy diet and at the same time considering the environmental sustainability aspects of production and consumption of the diet are urgent global issues. We developed the WISH (World Index for Sustainability and Health) to evaluate diets for healthiness and sustainability. The WISH seeks to measure two complex multidimensional concepts, diet quality and environmental sustainability, in one scoring system. The WISH is based on the EAT-Lancet recommendations for a healthy and sustainable diet in the general population with global applicability across multiple settings. Thirteen food groups are scored between 0 and 10, based on their association with disease and impact on environmental indicators. The scoring system was applied using a dataset of duplicate 24 h dietary recalls from 396 urban Vietnamese men and women. Out of a maximum score of 130, the mean total WISH score was 46 (SD 11), and scores for the healthy and high-environmental impact sub-scores were mean 25 (11) (out of 100) and mean 26 (8) (out of 70) respectively. A higher score was observed for the less-healthy (mean 20 (2) out of 30) sub-score. Our initial analysis shows that the WISH is able to differentiate between the healthiness and the environmental sustainability of a Vietnamese diet.

Background: Increased urbanization has been linked to transitions in dietary patterns. However, evidence on the impacts of urbanization on diet quality, and environmental impact, and diet cost is limited. The aim of this study was to investigate the time trends of these three dietary sustainability in China over the period 1997–2011 and to examine their associations with urbanization. Methods: Food consumption of 8,330 participants (18–64y) of the China Health and Nutrition Survey cohort (1997, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011) were examined and diet quality was assessed using the Chinese Healthy Eating Index 2016 (CHEI2016). Dietary related environmental impacts on Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHGE), Total Water Use (TWU), and Land Use (LU) were estimated using the Chinese Food Life Cycle Assessment Database. Monetary cost of diet was calculated using the community market prices of food items. Multilevel mixed-effects models were used to estimate associations between the time trend of dietary sustainability indicators and degree of urbanization. Results: From 1997 to 2011, the CHEI2016 score increased by 10.6%, GHGE by 23.8%, LU by 29.1%, and the inflation-corrected cost of diet by 80%. Urbanization was positively associated with these time trends, which remained after adjustment for sociodemographic and lifestyle factors (all P < 0·05). Conclusion: The rapid urbanization in China over the past two decades has been followed by an improvement in the overall dietary quality, but this has been accompanied by an increase in the environmental impacts and higher cost of the diet, especially in communities with lower urbanization index.

AbstractFood systems that deliver healthy diets without exceeding the planet’s resources are essential to achieve the worlds’ ambitious development goals. Healthy diets need to be safe, accessible, and affordable for all, including for disadvantaged and nutritionally vulnerable groups such as of smallholder producers, traders, and consumers in low- and middle-income countries. Globally, food systems are experiencing rapid and drastic changes and are failing to fulfil these multiple duties simultaneously. The international community therefore calls for rigorous food systems transformations and policy solutions to support the achievement of healthy diets for all. Most strategies, however, are essentially supply- and market-oriented. Incorporation of a healthy diet perspective in food system transformation is essential to enable food systems to deliver not only on supplying nutritious foods but also on ensuring that consumers have access can afford and desire healthy, sustainable, and culturally acceptable diets. This paper argues that this should be guided by information on diets, dietary trends, consumer motives, and food environment characteristics. Transformational approaches and policies should also take into account the stage of food system development requiring different strategies to ensure healthier diets for consumers. We review current knowledge on drivers of consumer choices at the individual and food environment level with special emphasis on low- and middle income countries, discuss the converging and conflicting objectives that exist among multiple food-system actors, and argue that failure to strengthen synergies and resolve trade-offs may lead to missed opportunities and benefits, or negative unintended consequences in food system outcomes. The paper proposes a menu of promising consumer- and food-environment- oriented policy options to include in the food systems transformation agenda in order to shift LMIC consumer demand towards healthier diets in low- and middle income countries.

Biofortification is an effective method to improve the nutritional content of crops and nutritional intake. Breeding for higher micronutrient mineral content in beans is correlated with an increase in phytic acid, a main inhibitor of mineral absorption in humans. Low phytic acid (lpa) beans have a 90% lower phytic acid content compared to conventional beans. This is the first study to investigate mineral and total phytic acid retention after preparing common household recipes from conventional, biofortified and lpa beans. Mineral retention was determined for two conventional, three biofortified and two lpa bean genotypes. Treatments included soaking, boiling (boiled beans) and refrying (bean paste). The average true retention of iron after boiling was 77.2–91.3%; for zinc 41.2–84.0%; and for phytic acid 49.9–85.9%. Soaking led to a significant decrease in zinc and total phytic acid after boiling and refrying, whereas for iron no significant differences were found. lpa beans did not exhibit a consistent pattern of difference in iron and phytic acid retention compared to the other groups of beans. However, lpa beans had a significantly lower retention of zinc compared to conventional and biofortified varieties (p < 0.05). More research is needed to understand the underlying factors responsible for the differences in retention between the groups of beans, especially the low retention of zinc. Combining the lpa and biofortification traits could further improve the nutritional benefits of biofortified beans, by decreasing the phytic acid:iron and zinc ratio in beans.

The concept of food system has gained prominence in recent years amongst both scholars and policy-makers. Experts from diverse disciplines and backgrounds have in particular discussed the nature and origin of the “unsustainability” of our modern food systems. These efforts tend, however, to be framed within distinctive disciplinary narratives. In this paper we propose to explore these narratives and to shed light on the explicit -or implicit- epistemological assumptions, mental models, and disciplinary paradigms that underpin those. The analysis indicates that different views and interpretations prevail amongst experts about the nature of the “crisis”, and consequently about the research and priorities needed to “fix” the problem. We then explore how sustainability is included in these different narratives and the link to the question of healthy diets. The analysis reveals that the concept of sustainability, although widely used by all the different communities of practice, remains poorly defined, and applied in different ways and usually based on a relatively narrow interpretation. In so doing we argue that current attempts to equate or subsume healthy diets within sustainability in the context of food system may be misleading and need to be challenged. We stress that trade-offs between different dimensions of food system sustainability are unavoidable and need to be navigated in an explicit manner when developing or implementing sustainable food system initiatives. Building on this overall analysis, a framework structured around several entry points including outcomes, core activities, trade-offs and feedbacks is then proposed, which allows to identify key elements necessary to support the transition toward sustainable food systems.