The potential benefits of dietary shift in China: Synergies among acceptability, health, and environmental sustainability

Abstract

The transition to a healthier diet recommended by national dietary guidelines in China may not achieve sufficient environmental benefits. This study assesses China's potential of transforming into a sustainable diet and the trade-offs among reducing food-related environmental impacts, improving nutritional quality and respecting eating habits. We used multi-objective optimization to build optimized scenarios, with the lowest environmental footprint and greatest acceptability (i.e., with the minimum departure from the currently observed diet) as optimization goals, and adequate macro- and micronutrient intake levels as constraints. In doing so, we assessed the actual benefits and synergies of reducing carbon footprint (CF), water footprint (WF), and ecological footprint (EF) and improving health and respecting dietary acceptance under the corresponding scenarios. The results show that CF, WF and EF can be reduced by up to 19%, 15% and 30% respectively, while satisfying nutritional constraints and achieving the minimum deviation from the current food combination. The greatest synergistic benefits for CF, WF and EF are achieved when the minimum CF is the optimization goal; the maximum synergistic benefits for the environment, health and acceptability are achieved when the CF is reduced by 10%. Our findings identify the trade-offs and synergies dietary changes considering nutritional benefits, environmental sustainability and acceptability, and reveal the challenges and opportunities for achieving such synergies.

Keywords: Diet optimization; Environmental footprint; Environmental-health-acceptability nexus; Integrative benefits; Sustainable diet; Synergy and trade-offs.