Towards Healthy and Sustainable Diets by Sirpa Sarlio

Author:Sirpa Sarlio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

3.1.2 Studies on Healthy and Sustainable Diet

Research on healthy and sustainable diets has increased rapidly over the last few decades but the scope of the studies carried out remains limited. Such studies should ideally evaluate all the dimensions of a sustainable and healthy diet such as nutritional quality and health, environmental impact including the optimal use of natural resources and biodiversity, cultural acceptability, affordability, accessibility, and economic fairness. Instead such studies tend to focus on diets’ environmental impacts, particularly greenhouse gas emissions and occasionally land use or water footprints. Nutritional adequacy is only rarely or partially addressed as are other dimensions of sustainable diets such as food prices.

Despite their narrow scope and lack of information, existing studies report broadly similar results in suggesting the benefits of more plant-based diets. A systematic review of 63 studies showed that reducing animal-based consumption is the most effective way of reducing ecological footprints with vegan diets indicating the greatest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and land use. Analyses of the health benefits are limited but all existing studies suggest the health benefits of sustainable diets (Aleksandrowicz et al. 2016). The choice of which foods might replace meat, however, is critical because some otherwise healthy foods may be more expensive or may increase greenhouse gas emissions .

Relatively minor affordable and acceptable changes in diets can both improve nutrition and reduce food’s environmental impact (see Horgan et al. 2016; Macdiarmid et al. 2012; Perignon et al. 2017). Moreover, Horgan et al. (2016) illustrated in their modeling study based on dietary data from the UK the many ways of improving the healthiness of current diets and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions . These improvements require reducing portion sizes and the frequency of eating certain foods while introducing some new foods, but rarely require completely removing foods from diets. Consumed in moderation, almost anything can be part of a healthy and sustainable diet. But healthier diets seem to be easier to achieve than sustainable diets requiring more changes to current dietary habits.

There are synergies between dietary guidelines for health and those for environmental sustainability. Healthy eating guidelines usually have a positive effect on the environment. But the benefits of healthy eating guidelines are greater for health than for the environment. There are also controversies. A complex area is a guideline about sugar : decreasing sugar intake is beneficial for health but it may be negative for environment if calories from sugar are replaced by other foods that have higher environmental footprint than sugar (Irz et al. 2016).

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