Country-Specific Sustainable Diets Using Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

Current diets of most nations either do not meet the nutrition recommendations or transgress environmental planetary boundaries or both. Transitioning toward sustainable diets that are nutritionally adequate and low in environmental impact is key in achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. However, designing region-specific sustainable diets that are culturally acceptable is a formidable challenge. Recent studies have suggested that optimization algorithms offer a potential solution to the above challenge, but the evidence is mostly based on case studies from high-income nations using widely varying constraints and algorithms. Here, we employ nonlinear optimization modeling with a consistent study design to identify diets for 152 countries that meet four cultural acceptability constraints, five food-related per capita environmental planetary boundaries (carbon emissions, water, land, nitrogen, and phosphorus use), and the daily recommended levels for 29 nutrients. The results show that a considerable departure from current dietary behavior is required for all countries. The required changes in intake amounts of 221 food items are highly country-specific but in general point toward a need to reduce the intake of meat, dairy, rice, and sugar and an increase in fruits, vegetables, pulses, nuts, and other grains. The constraints for fiber, vitamin B12, vitamin E, and saturated fats and the planetary boundaries for carbon emissions and nitrogen application were the most difficult to meet, suggesting the need to pay special attention to them. The analysis demonstrates that nonlinear optimization is a powerful tool to design diets achieving multiple objectives.

Cropland Footprints of Australian Dietary Choices

“…Our objective was to identify dietary patterns existing within the Australian community that are characterised by higher diet quality and lower environmental impacts related to cropland use. Land use and biodiversity indicators have previously been applied to average diets and dietary scenarios [4,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report on the impacts related to cropland use associated with individual daily diets.…”

Current and future trends in socio-economic, demographic and governance factors affecting global primate conservation

“…Past studies have gathered both quantitative and qualitative evidence on several local and national interventions that can generate positive outcomes for primates and biodiversity in general. For example, shifting to diets (sustainable consumption) with fewer animal-based products and thus a reduced environmental footprint can relieve some of the existing pressure on species’ habitat, resulting in lower species extinction risk (see Willett et al, 2019 ; Machovina, Feeley & Ripple, 2015 ; Chaudhary & Krishna, 2019 ). Similarly, adopting sustainable tropical forest management practices such as reduced impact logging, can reduce species losses and environmental degradation ( Chaudhary et al, 2016 ).…”

Indicators and Recommendations for Assessing Sustainable Healthy Diets

“…Environmental footprint approaches are able to pair food-production estimates with country-specific environmental footprints and compare them with planetary boundar-ies [151,152]. The footprint indicators used in sustainable diet studies are GHG emissions, freshwater use, land use and nitrogen, phosphorus application, biodiversity, energy and the ecological footprint [153][154][155][156][157][158][159][160][161]. However, many authors do not adopt these methodologies from a holistic perspective to assess the environmental impact from diets.…”