This study examines how a shift to lower environmental impact diets (diets with less meat and dairy) might the affect nutrient intakes of young children in the Netherlands.  It is unusual in that it looks specifically at children, rather than adults or the general population.

Policy makers can make a significant difference to ensure healthy diets for people at every stage of life. The Global Panel’s policy brief Climate-smart food systems for enhanced nutrition urges decision makers to adopt a pro-nutrition lens while protecting and promoting agriculture in the face of climate change. Ahead of the Paris climate negotiations, Climate-smart food systems for enhanced nutrition explains the challenges of meeting both agricultural and nutritional needs in the face of climate change. It identifies specific opportunities for policy change that can simultaneously enhance food and nutrition security. The panel writes:

This second annual nutrition report by IFPRI is a comprehensive summary and scorecard on both global and country level progress on all forms of nutrition. It covers nutrition status and program coverage—as well as underlying determinants such as food security; water, sanitation, and hygiene; resource allocations; and institutional and policy changes—globally (for 193 countries).  The 2015 edition highlights the critical relationship between climate change and nutrition and the pivotal role business can play.

An article in Beverage Daily covers the recent FCRN-Chatham House (EAT-funded) report “Policies and actions to shift eating patterns: What works.” The article highlights a key conclusion of the report:

The Swedish environment and sustainability magazine Miljöaktuellt has carried out a survey of municipalities in Sweden which show that 4 out of 10 schools have implemented either a meat-free day a week or undertaken other activities that reduce meat consumption to an equivalent degree.  This number of participating schools represents an increase of 35% from the previous year.

In this post on the Public Health England blog, Alison Tedstone discusses sustainable healthy diets and what such a diet can look like in the UK.  It particularly discusses the consumption and production of meat and dairy.

This joint survey by the Food Standards Agency, Foodsafe and the Consumer Council in Northern Ireland finds that low ­income families need to spend at least one third of their weekly income on food if they want to eat healthily.  This percentage was the result when consumers were asked to select a realistic, healthy food basket that met the family’s taste requirements and included some special food items for visitors and social occasions.

This report is produced as follow-on work to the Green Food Project, which focused on sustainable consumption and production. The Green Food Project report in July 2012 concluded that follow-on work was required to enable a broader and more sophisticated debate around the roles that diet and consumption play in the sustainability of the whole food system.

This literature review, undertaken by the Food Climate Research Network and Chatham House, and in association with EAT who also kindly supported the work, considers what the evidence has to say about effective ways of shifting people’s consumption patterns in more sustainable and healthy directions.