Perspective: Food Environment, Climate Change, Inflammation, Diet, and Health

Abstract

Human activities contribute to large shifts in the global climate, with far-reaching impacts on ecosystems, societies, and human health. Modern food systems—designed to produce convenience foods that tend to have high inflammatory potential—exacerbate environmental degradation and shape the interwoven challenges of climate, nutrition, and health. Over the past 3 decades, extreme weather has worsened, and poor diets have led to more inflammation-related health problems—2 parallel trends that are exposing system-wide weaknesses and harming global health. Is there evidence of a connection between environmental degradation and inflammation? The medical and environmental literatures were searched by combining “climate change” OR “environmental factors” OR “food systems” AND “inflammation” AND “diet.” All permutations of these terms were used, and all terms were searched as both text words and MeSH terms. The literature on inflammation and health is vast (∼750,000 articles in the National Library of Medicine [NLM]) as is the literature on diet and health (>1.8 million articles in the NLM). Interest in global climate change is growing (∼39,000 references in the NLM and >650,000 references in the Web of Science Core Collection). Although the literature at the intersections of diet and inflammation with either climate change or, especially, food systems is small, evidence points to a connection between global climate changes and inflammation operating mainly through food systems. Large-scale industrialized agriculture and other environmental changes that are heating the planet produce food commodities that are causally related to inflammatory processes within organisms. The interplay between individuals’ dietary decisions and system-level decisions regarding food production and processing sets the stage for deepening understanding of connections revealed in the literature and developing a multifaceted approach to address these critical problems that encompass individual behavior change and collaborative initiatives across sectors to effect meaningful change.