This editorial in the guardian argues that food and hunger should be at the table in the Paris climate meeting later this year.  The Editor writes:

This paper, entitled Dietary quality among men and women in 187 countries in 1990 and 2010: a systematic assessment argues that although worldwide, consumption of healthy foods such as fruit and vegetables has improved during the past two decades, it has been outpaced in most regions by the increased intake of unhealthy foods such as processed meat and sweetened drinks.

The 2015 USDA’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, has published a report that sets out its revised dietary recommendations to encourage Americans to eat more healthily, and this time the recommendations also take account of environmental sustainability considerations. The report, Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (Advisory Report) will be reviewed by the Secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Federal government will determine how it will use the information in the Advisory Report as the government develops the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2015 to be released later this year.

This new series of papers from the Lancet summarises the latest available knowledge on obesity and what can be done to address the problem. The series introduction describes how today’s food environments exploits people’s biological, psychological, social, and economic vulnerabilities, making it easier for them to eat unhealthy foods. This in turn reinforces preferences and demands for foods of poor nutritional quality, furthering the unhealthy food environments. The authors call for regulatory actions from governments and increased efforts from industry and civil society to break these vicious cycles.

This study focuses on UK diets.  It finds that if in average diets conformed to WHO recommendations, associated GHG emissions would be reduced by 17%.  Further reductions of up to 40% can be achieve through dietary shifts that include a reduction in animal products and processed snacks, and more fruit and vegetables. Abstract and conclusions as follows:

This paper investigates the environmental impact of the diets of Australian households at different income quintiles. The paper looked at 2003 household consumption and argues that income affects the environmental impacts of household diet, with higher income corresponding to higher impacts. The higher the income bracket the more was spent on food and this translated through to a higher environmental impact (GHG CO2e, water, waste, energy) at higher incomes.

In this blog-post for the The Institute of Food Safety, Integrity & Protection (TiFSiP) Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at the City University London and FCRN advisory board member, discusses sustainable diets.  He argues that the pursuit of food integrity and authenticity is also the pursuit of sustainability.

This paper presents two ways of including environmental and nutritional aspects in the sustainability assessment of diets. Three diets were assessed using these two methods: a diet issued from the National Food Agency as a recommended diet reflecting food preferences in Sweden (SNÖ), a diet corresponding to current average food consumption in Sweden according to the latest food intake survey (Riksmaten) and a Low Carbohydrate-High Fat (LCHF) diet, which is a popular life-style diet in Sweden currently.

In this study, 483 food items (developed by the Casino Group retailer company) were grouped into 34 categories and then 5 major food groups; meat and meat products, milk and dairy products, processed fruits and vegetables, grains and other foods and sweets. The aggregated average carbon footprints of the categories and major food groups were presented per 100 gram of product, per 100 kcal of product and per two different nutrient density scores including six and 15 nutrients respectively.