Analysis finds mixed diets balance nutrition and reduce carbon footprint

What we eat can affect our health as well as the environment. Many studies have looked at the effects of diets in very general terms focused on the level of food groups. A new study led by researchers at the University of Tokyo examines this issue following a more nuanced approach at the dish level. The research is published in the journal Scientific Progress.

One of the advantages of this type of study is that people’s connections to their diets vary around the world and are strongly culturally related. Knowledge of the effects of diets using dishes other than broad food groups can help individuals make informed choices and those in the food industry to improve their practices.

“Our main conclusion is this: Mixed diets can offer good health and environmental results. This is because mixed diets can give consumers a greater variety of dishes that can meet the needs of nutrients and a low carbon footprint,” said the study’s lead author, Associate Professor Yin Long of the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Engineering.

“We identified trade-offs in terms of nutrition, carbon footprint and price for individual dishes containing multiple ingredients, rather than using broad food categories such as red meat, fish or vegetables, as has been done in most similar studies to date .

“While dishes from the same broad categories such as beef-based or fish-based dishes show common trends as found in other studies of relatively higher carbon footprints, there are times when dishes do not follow the patterns of their food groups instead. also interesting to see a large number of dishes with low nutrient density and correspondingly low emissions and prices.”

Such examples are diets based on dishes with a higher proportion of plant-based ingredients which usually have a lower carbon footprint, but sometimes do not meet the daily requirements for some nutrients. Conversely, mixed diets strike a balance between what is considered a good nutritional yield and carbon footprint. This is because mixed diets tend to allow for more combinations of dishes that meet the daily nutritional requirements and have a lower carbohydrate footprint than stricter diets, for example, diets that rely on only a subset of dish categories.

​​​​The researchers discovered this by analyzing data on 45 popular Japanese dishes that contain multiple ingredients and have different cooking times, using algorithms that seek to optimize several parameters within of data sets.

“We should emphasize that we do not believe that impact analyzes based on food groups and dishes are mutually exclusive, however. Rather, we believe that they are highly complementary. For example, group-based approaches can food to reveal in general what sustainable diets can look like. and how to achieve them at the production level, referring to feasible directions for changing food systems at the global and international level,” said Professor Alexandros Gasparatos , another author of the study from the University of Tokyo Institute for Future Initiatives.

“At the same time, we believe that a dish-based approach can better inform the daily organization of food consumption at the national and local level, by acting as a reality check to guide, design and place feasible and acceptable ways expressed. dietary habits towards more sustainable directions.”

In a way, dish-based approaches can better reflect the way food is prepared and eaten in a particular local context. This better reflects cultural preferences for certain tastes or cooking methods, and the cultural acceptability of certain food items. It can also better reflect the relative availability of certain food items, which may itself be due to local environmental conditions, which continue to change.

“Different cultural preferences and availability of ingredients have led to very different ways of building healthy, sustainable diets between different countries and local contexts,” said Gasparatos.

“Dietary choices have important consequences for human health and the environment. On the one hand, unhealthy dietary habits are associated with the increased prevalence of obesity, diabetes and various types of cancers. On the other hand, there can be serious consequences producing food on the environment through land use, carbon emissions, methane emissions, water pollution, and over-consumption and more.

“I myself have tried a number of diet-conscious changes over the past few years before I went to work on this study. However, participating in this research reaffirmed my belief that essays give mixed food has many benefits and they helped me to identify some items and dishes. maybe eat in moderation.”