Transitioning to sustainable healthy diets: A model-based and conceptual system thinking approach to optimized sustainable diet concepts in the United States

Abstract

Food production and consumption are essential in human existence, yet they are implicated in the high occurrences of preventable chronic diseases and environmental degradation. Although healthy food may not necessarily be sustainable and vice versa, there is an opportunity to make our food both healthy and sustainable. Attempts have been made to conceptualize how sustainable healthy food may be produced and consumed; however, available data suggest a rise in the prevalence of health-related and negative environmental consequences of our food supply. Thus, the transition from conceptual frameworks to implementing these concepts has not always been effective. This paper explores the relative environmental and health risks associated with highly consumed food groups and develops a methodological workflow for evaluating the sustainability of diet concepts in the context of different health, socio-economic and environmental indicators. In addition, we apply the multi-criteria decision-making techniques (an integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process- Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (AHP-TOPSIS) model) to examine the health and environmental impact of selected sustainable healthy diet concepts implemented in the United States. The principal findings indicate that adopting plant-based diet patterns would benefit the environment and the population's health. However, the up-scale, broad adoption and implementation of these concepts are hindered by critical bottlenecks. Hence we propose potential modification strategies through a conceptual system thinking approach to deliver optimized sustainable diet concepts to aid in the realization of the anticipated benefits of adoption/implementation.

Plant-Based Innovations for the Transition to Sustainability: A Bibliometric and in-Depth Content Analysis

“…Plant-based food is considered environmentally friendly and better for animal welfare than conventional analogs. The shift to a sustainable plant-based diet might significantly reduce total GHG emissions, land use, water consumption and energy use [160]. This finding corroborates studies that revealed that replacing animal-origin foods with plant-based foods might reduce food-related greenhouse gas emissions.…”

Identifying Optimally Sustainable Foods: A Four-Dimensional Analysis of Sustainable Foods in the American Diet

“…The relationship between nutrient density and cost is well established, with numerous studies demonstrating that nutrient-dense foods and diets tend to be more expensive [30,42,43] yet also have a lower environmental impact [20,21,25]. The substantial positive correlation between nutrient density and cost, along with the significant negative correlation between nutrient density and environmental impact, aligns with patterns observed in the existing literature [25,42,43].…”

“…Many studies have analyzed two dimensions of sustainable diets [6,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24], with fewer studies including three [25][26][27][28][29] and even fewer measuring all four [30,31]. It is key to consider that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions is often the only measurement of environmental impact explored in these studies [19,20,27,28,30,31].…”

Distinct fecal microbial signatures are linked to sex and chronic immune activation in pediatric HIV infection

“…Improving the health of CLWH (and HUU) is very important. One possible avenue is dietary interventions, which can be very successful short-term, but are not largely sustainable over time ( 73 , 74 ). Food and nutrition literacy should only be explored, as empowering children with knowledge and skills related to nutrition and dietary habits, are likely to promote healthier eating behaviors from an early age ( 75 ).…”