Balancing animal-source food intake between nutritional requirements and sustainability impacts

The current environmental, social, and economic challenges of food systems necessitate actions towards more sustainable consumption patterns and production approaches. Reducing animalsource food (ASF) intake is a promising strategy to solve multiple sustainability issues. However, how many and which animals could be part of a sustainable food system remains up for discussion, as well as how the remaining ASF should best be produced. This thesis aimed to investigate the role of ASF in current and potential future food systems, with special emphasis on integrating different sustainability impacts. We conducted a literature review to understand why certain ASF are proposed as solutions for more sustainable diets. There, we found that studies considering statusquo impact assessments and specifying consumption-oriented scenarios recommend to reduce beef and pork rather than chicken. In these studies, the role of ASF is mostly limited to current production practices and feed food competition is not addressed. Studies considering systemic consequences and specifying resource-oriented scenarios propose larger reductions of chicken and pork, because these are produced with more food-competing feed. In these latter studies, the role of animals and the resulting ASF is mostly limited to converting low-opportunity-cost biomass, thereby avoiding feed-food competition. In future research and communication of more sustainable dietary solutions, these choices and the resulting consequences should be considered to enable effective communication and policy design. Further, we assessed environmental and socio economic impacts of current dietary choices in Switzerland, and related these to different sociodemographic and lifestyle factors. Our results showed that while nationalities, language regions, age groups, and smoking status seemed particularly distinctive, income or educational groups seemed hardly relevant. Food choices and the resulting sustainability impacts thus markedly differed between these factors, suggesting that these can be relevant, for example, to target nutrition campaigns. Then, we assessed environmental and socio-economic impacts of different consumer strategies for Switzerland, including dietary changes as well as production-side changes. While the dietary changes towards more plant-based diets improved the environmental performance, diet quality, and diet cost, these changes increased social risks. Moreover, increased share of organic agriculture had ambivalent effects on the environmental performance. When enhanced with circularity principles, however, all environmental indicators improved substantially. Consequently, we assessed the nutritional and environmental consequences of integrating animal-source food recommendations with circularity principles, both in national dietary guidelines (Bulgaria, Malta, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland) and for the EAT-Lancet dietary guidelines. While for the latter, ASF protein of the recommendations could be met, we found this not to be feasible for the national guidelines assessed. Nevertheless, considering circularity aspects in dietary guidelines by linking the types of ASF to available low-opportunity-cost biomass offers large potential to improve the resource use efficiency in food systems, and simultaneously improving environmental performance. In conclusion, the role of ASF in more sustainable food systems can be manifold – and depends largely on the required nutritional contributions as well as on defined priorities for different dimensions of sustainability. Importantly, to thoroughly assess the role and potential of ASF for improved sustainability, adequate methods need to be used and adopting a systems-level analysis going beyond product-specific efficiency measures is unavoidable

Synergien und Zielkonflikte zwischen gesunder Ernährung und nachhaltiger Lebensmittelproduktion

Inhalt: - Konsum- und produktionsseitige Strategien - Zirkuläre Strategien: Flächen- und Nahrungsmittelkonkurrenz - Referenz: menuCH dietary recalls - Wege zu nachhaltigeren Ernährungssystemen - Synergien und Zielkonflikt

Environmental impact assessment of dietary scenarios: a comparison of methodological aspects

Background Dietary patterns have manifold impacts on the environment. • However, studies that assess dietary patterns operate with varying methodological approaches and underlying assumptions, which evoke different, and occasionally even contradicting, results. • This leads to uncertainty regarding what should or should not be eaten, especially with regard to animal-source food (ASF) and production types (e.g. conventional or organic). • Therefore, to adequately interpret results, it is necessary to interpret these in the context of the respective methods used and assumptions made

Agroecology

Content - Food system challenges: past, present, future - Contribution of agriculture to the planetary boundaries - Environmental impacts of our food system - Climate change and agriculture - Planetary Health Diet - 10 elements of agroeoclogy - Nutrient supply - Circular food system - Plant protection - Plant protection strategy in organic farming - Example: Biocontrol - Crop rotations - Soil carbon - Agroecology – naturalness - examples - Policy levers driving sustainability in global agriculture - Agroecology and human health - Dietary indices: Alternate Healthy Eating Index - Benefits for human health - Agroecology, soil biodiversity and human health - Land-use management, soil biodiversity and human health - Conclusion

SOLm Model Documentation

SOLm is a mass- and nutrient-flow model capturing the global food system on the level of geographic units (default: countries), linking production, consumption and trade, with the aim to derive and analyse the food system’s input use, outputs and sustainability impacts for a wide range of future or counterfactual current food system scenarios. This section describes SOLm in general terms. Further details are given in the subsequent sections 2 and 3

Sustainable and healthy diets: trade-offs and synergies : final scientific report

This project aimed at analysing trade-offs and synergies between healthy nutrition and sustainable food systems. First, we identified nutritional patters of the Swiss population based on representative consumption data. The health impacts of these nutritional patterns were then analysed based on a review of the scientific literature on health impacts of food commodities and diets and by calculating the Alternate Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), the Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS) and Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) of the nutritional patterns. Second, we comprehensively analysed health, environmental, social and economic impacts and related trade-offs and synergies for a number of future scenarios of Swiss agricultural production and food consumption. For this, we used a modelling approach, linking three different models: a global mass flow model, a system dynamics model and an environmentally extended input-output model. We modelled ten different scenarios for the Swiss Food Sector in 2050. These scenarios were either developed in a participatory process during a series of interviews and group discussions with different groups of stakeholders or optimised environmental impacts while at the same time complying with different nutritional and agronomic restrictions. Three main scenarios were analysed with all three models in detail. Among these main scenarios was the SwissFoodPyramid2050 Scenario, which assumes a widespread implementation of the nutritional recommendations according to the Swiss Food Pyramid. The FeedNoFood2050 Scenario assumes an improved use of agricultural land by feeding only grass and by-products to livestock, which was not competing with direct human nutrition, i.e. did not require arable land (neither in Switzerland nor abroad). The third scenario was a reference scenario, which assumes no changes in diets until 2050 and which was used to compare the two alternative scenarios. The other scenarios were targeted at specific questions such as minimizing greenhouse gases. Our results illustrate two visions of how healthy diets and sustainable food systems could look like. Both the SwissFoodPyramid2050 and the FeedNoFood2005 scenarios would require similar dietary changes, such as a reduction of meat consumption and an increase of consumption of pulses. However, there are also fundamental differences between the diets in the two alternative scenarios, e.g. regarding the type of meat consumed. These differences can be interpreted as trade-offs which result from agronomic boundary conditions such as the coupled production of milk and meat, the availability of natural resources, such as grassland and co-products of food processing and health aspects of Swiss diets. Of primary importance in this respect was the use of permanent grasslands and the co-production of veal and beef with dairy production due to environmental reasons and reasons for optimally utilizing available resources. This means, if permanent grassland should be maintained as an ecosystem, dairy production would provide the basis for animal proteins. Thus, while in the FeedNoFood2050 Scenario veal and rather low-quality beef from dairy cows is consumed instead of meat from monogastrics, the SwissFoodPyramid2050 Scenario would result in a higher amount of meat from monogastrics. Our results imply that there is a lack of a comprehensive food systems view in the current discussion on healthy and sustainable diets. Stronger coherence between health, food and agricultural policy is needed to account for systemic boundary conditions and thus to allow for minimising trade-offs and maximise synergies. Current agricultural policies fail to address the health perspective. Financial support for meat and sugar producers, which lead to lower prices for those products and ultimately to a higher consumption than without these policies, are two obvious examples. Yet, comprehensive visions such as the SwissFoodPyramid scenario, the FeedNoFood Scenario or optimised scenarios would require an even more complex policy mix of incentives, regulations and information campaigns. This would probably need an adaptation of the current institutional setting and division of competences between the Federal Offices for Agriculture (FOAG) and for the Environment (FOEN), the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office (FSVO). A commonly shared vision, including specific goals with respect to how the Swiss food system should look like, is urgently needed. Developing such a vision needs to involve all operators and stakeholders of the food system, as our results imply that more sustainable and healthy diets do not necessarily go along with financial benefits of both producers and consumers. These trade-offs and the knowledge of behavioural economics need to be considered for designing settings which create mutual benefits for operators in the food sector. For instance, neither the majority of consumers, food industry nor agricultural producers can be expected to respond altruistically as an entire sector in the long term. Therefore, policy needs to set financial incentives for internalising environmental and social externalities in order to push and pull the food system towards sustainability. Furthermore, it is crucial to account for agronomic boundary conditions and systemic aspects, such as the role of ruminants in utilizing grasslands and the unavoidable link of milk and meat production

Combining Recent Nutritional Data with Prospective Cohorts to Quantify the Impact of Modern Dietary Patterns on Disability–Adjusted Life Years: A Feasibility Study

Unhealthy diets are commonly associated with increased disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from noncommunicable diseases. The association between DALYs and dietary patterns can be quantified with individual longitudinal data. This assessment, however, is often based on dietary data collected once at cohort entry, therefore reflecting the impact of “old” dietary habits on morbidity and mortality. To overcome this limitation, we tested the association of contemporary diets with DALYs. First, we defined contemporary dietary patterns consumed in Switzerland with the national nutrition survey menuCH (2014–2015). Second, we identified individuals who consumed similar diets in the NRP–MONICA census-linked cohort (1977–2015). In this cohort, individual data on disease and mortality were used to calculate the DALYs-dietary patterns association using a mixed regression model. A total of 58,771 DALYs from NCDs were recorded in a mean follow-up time of 25.5 years. After multivariable adjustments, the “Swiss traditional” pattern was not associated with an increase in DALYs compared to the “Prudent” pattern. However, individuals following a “Western” pattern had, on average 0.29 DALYs (95% CI 0.02, 0.56) more than those following a “Prudent” pattern, equating to a loss of healthy life of more than three months. These data highlight the feasibility of quantifying the impact of contemporary diets on DALYs without the establishment of new cohorts or the use of nationally aggregated data

Strategies towards a more sustainable Swiss food system

What did your last meal consist of? Was it environmentally-friendly? Healthy? Expensive

Environmental, social, and economic consequences of six food system strategies for Switzerland

Consumption- as well as production-side changes are needed to improve the sustainability performance of food systems. We assessed multiple impacts of six food system strategies for Switzerland. Two strategies encompassed dietary changes: following a pescetarian diet and adhering to the national dietary guidelines. Two strategies employed alternative farming systems: increasing the share of organic production and, in addition, applying the circularity principle of avoiding feed-food competition by excluding livestock feed grown on arable land. A fifth strategy reduced food waste. The sixth strategy increased the share of domestic produce. For all strategies, we assessed greenhouse gas emissions, land use, nitrogen surplus, social risks, diet quality, and diet costs. The strategies revealed trade-offs between impact categories, unless combined in a synergistic way. Combining all proposed strategies could lead to substantial improvements in all impact categories assessed, but would require a thorough transformation of the current food system

40:60: The optimal ratio between animal and plant-based proteins for health and environment

There is currently little agreement on the optimal ratio of animal-sourced (ASP) versus plant-sourced proteins (PSP) in sustainable human diets. We deployed a biophysical optimization model to find the optimal ASP:PSP ratio at current and recommended protein intake levels for the EU28 countries. Results show that the lowest environmental impact for both land use and greenhouse gas emissions is achieved at a recommended protein intake of 46 g protein/cap/day with an ASP:PSP ratio of 40:60 (18 g ASP/cap/day). At current protein intake (82 g protein/cap/day), the optimal ASP:PSP ratio for land use ranges evenly between 22:78 and 60:40 (18 and 49 g ASP/cap/day) while for greenhouse gas emissions the optimal ASP:PSP ratio is at 40:60 (18 g ASP/cap/day). Diets containing less than 18 g ASP/cap/day show micronutrient inadequacies, leading to increases in both land use and greenhouse gas emissions