Innovative metrics that track the impact of your diet on your health and environment

Understanding how diet impacts health and the environment is essential to monitoring and navigating changes in food systems.

Recent natural food In this study, we proposed a Health and Eco-Efficiency Index to assess how the diets of 195 countries have historically supported healthy living, environmental pollution, and resource consumption.

study: Dietary health and environmental efficiency show nonlinear trends from 1990 to 2011. Image credit: Foxys Forest Manufacture/Shutterstock.com

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Changing dietary patterns to obtain health benefits and reduce negative environmental impacts has become very important on policy agendas around the world.

Improper diets can not only negatively impact health, but also damage the environment through increased water consumption during manufacturing and anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Addressing sustainable food consumption patterns is essential to achieving sustainable development goals such as health and well-being and zero hunger.

Previous studies have not sufficiently investigated the relationship between changes in socio-economic development and the effects of dietary habits on the environment and health.

About research

To address the aforementioned gaps in the literature, this study assessed the environmental-health interactions between diet and socio-economic development in 195 countries.

The study sample was from 1990 to 2011. A health and environmental efficiency index was constructed. This was considered the ratio between environmental impacts and health benefits resulting from food production and consumption.

Reduction in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) was an indicator of health benefit. DALYs quantify years of healthy life lost due to diet-related disability and death.

Health-environment efficiency was based on four indicators: GHG emissions, acidification emissions, eutrophication emissions, and deficit-weighted water withdrawals. The association of these indicators with the country's socio-demographic index (SDI) was noted.

SDI is a related concept to Human Development Index (HDI), except that SDI does not include direct health effects.

This prevents confusion between results and determinants. The SDI compares health outcomes across countries in different socio-economic contexts.

research result

A nonlinear N-shaped response of health environment efficiency was observed as SDI increased. In other words, the correlation between the two variables was positive, negative, and positive.

The first phase of positive associations was driven by the elimination of maternal and child malnutrition due to increased food supplies.

In contrast, the negative relationship in the second phase was caused by the negative environmental effects of the transition to aminal products. The final phase of positive associations in some developed countries was primarily due to a shift to healthier diets.

The proposed indicators help integrate environmental and health impacts, whether contradictory or coincident.

This indicator is versatile and can be modified to suit a wider range of ecological concerns. Additionally, it can account for technological advances and other dynamic factors that cause temporal changes in environmental impacts.

Policy makers can use health and environmental efficiency indicators to compare countries and identify areas for improvement and best practices.

This indicator can also be used to assess national dietary trends and the effectiveness of policy interventions.

Countries should aim to transition to healthier diets while minimizing negative impacts on the environment.

Developed countries on the far right of the SDI could follow Japan and Norway's approach by simultaneously reducing their meat consumption and increasing their consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Other measures, such as urban planning and dietary guidance through education, are also important for low- and middle-income countries.

Demand-side and supply-side issues can be difficult to change when they are deeply rooted in specific physical and socio-economic conditions. However, given the high medical costs associated with diets high in fat and meat, urgent action is needed.

Research limitations

The first limitation centers on potential endogeneity issues in regression analyses.

There were a number of observable and unobservable factors that could have influenced diet-related DALYs and environmental impacts.

Given that environmental issues influence SDI, reverse causality is also possible. A second limitation of the data used was that production techniques differed between countries, making it difficult to assess regional differences in the environmental impacts of producing specific foods.

Due to improved data availability, we now have more information about developed countries. This can lead to incorrect assessments of environmental impacts when applied on a global scale.

However, the ranking of foods for their environmental impact should be the same across regions.

This study focuses on national averages of food consumption and also ignores within-country heterogeneity.