Exploring the complexity of sustainable and healthy diets

Abstract

Amid escalating global concerns about environmental degradation and the pressing need to improve the nutritional quality of diets to meet the demands of a rapidly growing world population, the transformation of food systems has introduced social, economic, and environmental challenges. To address these issues, emergy synthesis, an accumulated energy measure considering environmental and anthropogenic transformation processes, offers a valuable scientific model for simulating and evaluating the environmental impacts of various dietary patterns. This approach facilitates the exploration of different scenarios, enabling the identification of sustainable solutions. The analysis provides comprehensive insights into diets that balance environmental sustainability and affordability by assessing resource use, environmental impacts, and economic costs associated with seven distinct dietary scenarios. The findings underscore that diets centered around meat consumption demand significantly higher energy inputs than plant-based diets and exceed established planetary thresholds for GHG emissions. This evidence highlights an urgent need to shift dietary patterns away from meat-centric diets to more effectively combat climate change. While the study found similar levels of agricultural land use across different diets, it revealed that plant-based diets significantly contribute to water consumption. These outcomes underscore the importance of making targeted and localized dietary adjustments to enhance the sustainability of food consumption. By minimizing the environmental load while simultaneously meeting the nutritional needs of an expanding population, these adjustments can play a crucial role in fostering a more sustainable interaction between human activities and the natural environment. The research findings have broader implications for improving human-environment interactions. They inform strategies for the various aspects of sustainable and healthy diets, focusing on their environmental support through emergy synthesis, which evaluates resource use, economic costs, and the associated environmental effects of different dietary patterns. In essence, this systematic approach to dietary planning, control, and monitoring is a pivotal measure in comprehensively and sustainably addressing environmental issues.