With more people becoming aware of the implications of climate change, there is a growing interest in producing and consuming food that has a lower carbon footprint. Nowadays, the food system plays a significant role in environmental issues. Future changes to these food systems could have a favorable effect on population health and environmental sustainability, with dietary choices being a key factor. The carbon footprint of actual American diets and how they relate to diet quality, however, are mostly unknown.
In a recent study, researchers compared the environmental costs of following several popular diets with the actual advantages of high-quality diets.The unstable health and sustainability situation brought on by climate change is severely impacted by modern agriculture. Future trends in food production may be influenced by consumer demand. An earlier study found that roughly one in seven Americans would alter their eating habits in order to support environmental sustainability.
Which diet strategy is therefore both the most healthful and sustainable? By using these criteria, the present study, which was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, tries to categorize six diets, including vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, paleo, keto, and others.
The NHANES (2005–2010) study, which examined each person’s 24-hour dietary recall data as part of a nationally representative survey of the health and nutritional status of the US population, provided the data. The scientists first determined the carbon footprint.Earlier research has shown that plant-based diets are the greenest. Similarly, replacing some meat with plant foods may reduce the GHGEs. In this study, the United States Department of Agriculture Food Patterns Equivalents Database was used to convert the actual foods eaten into food equivalents in various food groups for the purposes of standardization and comparison.
For obvious reasons, people who would have fitted more than one diet type were not included in this analysis. The GHGEs were calculated using the databases on food impacts and food recall impacts on the environment in terms of nutritional studies. These were earlier developed by the same group and named dataFIELD and dataFRIENDS, respectively.
