In Japan, this type of special meal, known as shojin ryori, is often completely plant-based. Some common foods in Japan can sometimes have a surprisingly low carbon footprint due to their low meat content and relatively shorter cooking times. Credit: 2024 Rohan Mehra
What we eat can affect both our health and the environment. Many studies have looked at the effects of diets in very general terms, focusing on food group levels. A new study led by researchers at the University of Tokyo examines this problem using a more nuanced approach at the dish level. The research has been published in the journal Scientific progress.
One of the benefits of this type of research is that people's connections to their eating habits vary around the world and have strong cultural associations. Knowledge of the impact of diets that use dishes rather than broad food groups can help individuals make informed choices and help those in the food industry improve their practices.
"Our key conclusion is this: blended diets can provide good health and environmental outcomes. This is because blended diets can offer consumers a greater diversity of dishes that can both meet nutritional needs and have a low environmental footprint," said the lead author of the paper. research. , Associate Professor Yin Long of the University of Tokyo Graduate School of Engineering.
"We identified trade-offs in nutrition, carbon footprint and price for individual multi-ingredient dishes, rather than using broad food categories such as red meat, fish or vegetables, as most similar studies have done to date.
"While dishes from the same broad categories, such as beef or fish-based dishes, show well-known trends found in other studies in having a relatively higher carbon footprint, there are times when dishes do not follow the patterns of their respective food groups. It is also interesting to see a large concentration of dishes with low nutrient density and correspondingly low emissions and prices."
Such examples are diets based on dishes with a higher proportion of plant-based ingredients that indeed have a lower carbon footprint, but sometimes do not meet the daily requirement for certain nutrients. Conversely, mixed diets strike a balance between what is considered a good nutritional outcome and the ecological footprint. This is because mixed diets typically provide greater combinations of dishes that both meet daily nutritional needs and have a low environmental footprint than more restrictive diets, for example diets that rely only on a subset of dish categories.
The researchers discovered this by analyzing data from 45 popular dishes in Japan, which consist of multiple ingredients and have different cooking times, using algorithms that attempt to optimize certain parameters within data sets.
"We must emphasize that we do not believe that impact analyzes based on food groups and dishes are mutually exclusive. Instead, we believe they are highly complementary. For example, approaches that rely on food groups can broadly reveal what sustainable diets might look like. and how to achieve these at the production level, pointing to feasible directions for transforming food systems at the global and international level," said Professor Alexandros Gasparatos, another author of the study from the University of Tokyo's Institute for Future Initiatives.
"At the same time, we believe that dish-based approaches can better inform the daily organization of food consumption at national and local levels, acting as a reality check to inform, design and convey feasible and acceptable ways to guide dietary habits in towards more sustainable directions."
In a sense, dish-based approaches can better reflect how food is actually prepared and consumed in a particular local context. This in turn better reflects cultural preferences for certain flavors or cooking methods, and the cultural acceptability of certain foods. It may also better reflect the relative availability of certain foods, which itself may be a result of local environmental conditions, which continue to change.
"Different cultural preferences and ingredient availability lead to radically different ways of building healthy and sustainable diets between different countries and local contexts," said Gasparatos.
"Food choices have important consequences for human health and the environment. On the one hand, unhealthy dietary habits have been linked to the increased prevalence of obesity, diabetes and several types of cancer. On the other hand, food production can have serious consequences for the environment. through land use, carbon emissions, methane emissions, water pollution and overconsumption and more.
"I myself have been trying to make a number of diet-conscious changes over the years before working on this research. However, involvement in this research confirmed my belief that mixed diets offer many benefits and helped me identify a number of items and dishes to perhaps to be consumed in moderation."
More information:
Yin Long et al., Mixed diets can meet nutritional needs with a lower environmental footprint, Scientific progress (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adh1077. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh1077
Provided by the University of Tokyo
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