A recent study by scientists at the University of Michigan evaluated more than 5,800 foods, classifying them by their nutritional disease burden on humans and their impact on the environment. They found that small changes in diet could be a step towards a healthier and more sustainable life.
Eating a hot dog could cost you 36 minutes of a healthy life, while choosing to eat a serving of nuts could help you gain 26 minutes of an extra healthy life, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Food.
He found that replacing 10% of your daily caloric intake of beef and processed meats with a blend of select fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and seafood could reduce your carbon footprint by a third and allow people to earn 48 minutes of health minutes a day.
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“In general, dietary recommendations do not have a specific and useful direction to motivate people to change their behavior and rarely do dietary recommendations address environmental impacts,” said Katerina Stylianou, who did the research as a doctoral candidate. and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences. at the UM School of Public Health.
She currently works as Director of Public Health Information and Data Strategy at the Detroit Department of Health.
This work is based on a new nutrition index based on epidemiology, the Health Nutritional Index, which the researchers developed in collaboration with nutritionist Victor Fulgoni III of Nutrition Impact LLC. HENI calculates the beneficial or detrimental burden on health in minutes of healthy living associated with a serving of food consumed.
The index is an adaptation of the overall disease burden, in which mortality and disease morbidity are associated with a single food choice of an individual. For HENI, the researchers used 15 dietary risk factors and GBD disease burden estimates and combined them with the nutritional profiles of foods consumed in the United States, based on the What We Eat in America database. of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
Foods with positive scores add a few minutes of healthy living, while foods with negative scores are associated with health outcomes that can harm human health.
To assess the environmental impact of food, IMPACT World, a method for assessing the life cycle impact of food (production, processing, manufacturing, preparation / cooking, consumption, waste), added improved assessments on the use of water and human health damage by the formation of fine particles.
They developed scores for 18 environmental indicators taking into account detailed food recipes and planned food waste.
Finally, the researchers classified the foods into three color zones: green, yellow, and red, based on their combined nutritional and environmental performance, as a traffic light.
The green zone represents foods that are recommended to increase in the diet and contains beneficial nutritious foods with a low environmental impact. The foods in this area are predominantly nuts, fruits, vegetables grown in the field, legumes, whole grains and some seafood.
The red zone includes foods that have significant nutritional or environmental impacts and should be reduced or avoided in the diet. Nutritional impacts were caused primarily by processed meats, and climate and most other environmental impacts were caused by beef and pork, lamb, and processed meats.
Researchers recognize that the range of all indicators varies substantially and also point out that nutritionally beneficial foods do not always generate the lowest environmental impacts and vice versa.
“Previous studies have often reduced their results to a discussion of animal- and plant-based foods,” Stylianou said. “While we find that plant-based foods tend to perform better, there are considerable variations in both plant-based and animal-based foods.”
According to their findings, the researchers suggest:
1. Decreased food with the most negative impacts on health and the environment, including elevated processes of meat, beef, shrimp, followed by pork, lamb and vegetables grown in greenhouses.
2. Increase the most nutritionally beneficial foods, including fruits and vegetables grown in the field, legumes, nuts and seafood with low environmental impact.
“The urgency of dietary changes to improve human health and the environment is clear,” said Olivier Jolliet, professor of environmental health sciences and lead author of the work. “Our findings show that small specific substitutions offer a feasible and powerful strategy to achieve significant health and environmental benefits without the need for dramatic dietary changes.”
The project was carried out under an unrestricted grant from the National Dairy Council and the University of Michigan Dow Sustainability Fellowship. Researchers are also working with partners from Switzerland, Brazil and Singapore to develop similar evaluation systems. Finally, they would like to expand it to countries around the world.
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