The European Commission was due to publish a Communication on Sustainable Food in 2013 to “assess how best to limit waste throughout the food supply chain, and consider ways to lower the environmental impact of food production and consumption patterns”.  This long-awaited Communication has still not been published.

The annual report 2013 from Bioversity international contains a special discussion on “Improved nutrition through sustainable food choices”. The sustainable diets research by Bioversity focuses on food and food systems, taking into account food diversity and how it can be produced and acquired across all seasons and under different economic circumstances.

This paper provides a schema for categorizing all diets as either: low carbohydrate; fat, low glycemic; Mediterranean; mixed, balanced; Paleolithic; or vegan.  The researchers emphasize that the aim of the research is not to recommend one particular diet over another, but rather to highlight how disease prevention and increased public health is best realised.

This paper looks at the environmental costs of food production and consumption. It offers an updated account of the GHG emissions associated with production of U.S. food losses at the retail/institution and consumer level and also considers the effects of a shift in diets away from current US consumption patterns towards those recommended by USDA dietary guidelines.

The next version of Dietary Guidelines for Americans, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seem likely to include advice on sustainable diets. Preliminary conclusions from a subcommittee on food sustainability and safety indicate that the message of how the food is produced will be included in the final recommendations. For more on these subcommittee discussions read an article in Science here.          Read more a bout the dietary guidelines here. You can also find more information on our website about other dietary guidelines and food policy.

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT)  has launched a new report on sustainable diets - People, Plate and Planet, describing dietary choices that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pressures on land. The report considers nutrition, GHG emissions and land use and states that the most significant impact on these areas comes from what we eat, not where it is from or how much packaging there is around it.

This paper provides a review of the current literature analysing environmental impacts of dietary recommendations. The review focuses on three aspects of dietary advice in particular: reducing the consumption of fat, reducing the consumption of meat-based protein and animal-based foods, and finally increasing the consumption of fruit and vegetables. It then reviews the environmental impact assessments and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) that have been undertaken in foods that have relevance to these three dietary recommendations.

This study is one of the very few that examines the GHG impacts of a selection of real life ‘self selected’ diets as opposed to those that are modelled or hypothetical.  It looks specifically at the dietary patterns (based on a standard 2,000 kcal diet) of UK vegetarians, semi-vegetarians and non-vegetarians.  Approximately 55,500 subjects were chosen for the study, all part of the EPIC-Oxford cohort study.

A summary of a discussion on sustainable diets, hosted by the Guardian, is now available on their website. It sought to take a holistic approach to the interlinked issues of food, farming, environment and health, focusing on the issues of how a sustainable diet should be defined and achieved.  Discussants included Jo Confino (Chair) Executive editor, the Guardian, Tim Lang Professor of Food Policy, City of London and David Nussbaum Chief executive, WWF, Tim Smith Group quality director, Tesco. You can read the summary here. See also FCRN discussion papers focusing on what a sustainable healthy diet is and how it can be achieved.