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Mexican national dietary guidelines promote less costly and environmentally sustainable diets

Nature Food volume 5, pages 703–713 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The 2023 Mexican Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Guidelines (HSDG 2023) were developed to include all dimensions of sustainability. Here we compare the environmental impact and cost of diets based on the HSDG 2023, current diets and the Mexican-adapted EAT healthy reference diet. Diets following HSDG 2023 are 21% less expensive, require 30% less land to be produced and have 34% less carbon emissions than current diets—particularly in Mexico City and other urban areas with higher prevalence of Westernized diets. This is driven by reduced animal-source food, especially red meat, and ultra-processed foods. In south–rural areas, the water footprint and cost of diets following HSDG 2023 were higher than those of current diets owing to increased intake of nuts, fruits and vegetables not offset by lower meat consumption (which is already close to recommendations). Diet environmental impact and cost could be further reduced with the Mexican-adapted EAT healthy reference diet compared with the HSDG 2023.

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Fig. 1: Environmental impacts of the HSDG 2023, EAT-HRD-Mex and the current diet of adults by selected regions and areas.
Fig. 2: Costs of the HSDG 2023, EAT-HRD-Mex and the current diet of adults by selected regions and areas.
Fig. 3: Costs by food group of the HSDG 2023, EAT-HRD-Mex and the current diet.

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Data availability

Dietary information from ENSANUT 2016 is publicly available at https://ensanut.insp.mx/encuestas/ensanut2016/descargas.php, food prices are available at https://www.inegi.org.mx/app/preciospromedio/ and data on environmental indicators for food production are available at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.855793/full#supplementary-material. The dataset analysed during our study is available via the open Figshare repository at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25749708 (ref. 48). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Code (do-files) in STATA version 15 used for the data analysis is available via the open Figshare repository at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25749708 (ref. 48).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Committee of Experts, the Committee of Multisectoral Institutions from the Government, the Academia, the Civil Society Organizations and the Ministry of Health for their contributions to the development of the 2023 Mexican HSDG. We thank the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Mexico for primarily funding this work (CI:1725 granted to A.B.A.) and the Mexican National Council of Humanity, Science and Technology (CONAHCyT) for partly funding this work through the Frontier in Science Call Pp F003 5/VIII-E/2022, project number 319721 granted to M.U.-M. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Health and Nutrition Research, National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico

    Mishel Unar-Munguía, Manuel A. Cervantes-Armenta, Sonia Rodríguez-Ramírez, Anabelle Bonvecchio Arenas & Ana Cecilia Fernández Gaxiola

  2. Center for Research in Population Health, National Institute of Public Health, Cuernavaca, Mexico

    Juan A. Rivera

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Contributions

M.U.-M., S.R.-R., A.C.F.G., J.A.R. and A.B.A. conceived the project. A.B.A. was the principal investigator of the development of the 2023 Mexican HSDG and was responsible for the overall project. M.U.-M. was responsible for developing the research plan related to environmental and cost analysis. M.U.-M., M.A.C.-A. and S.R.R. analysed the data, and M.A.C.-A. and M.U.-M. wrote the first draft. S.R.-R., A.C.F.G., J.A.R. and A.B.A. added important intellectual content. M.U.-M. and A.B.A. are primarily responsible for the final content. All authors read and approved the final paper as submitted.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anabelle Bonvecchio Arenas.

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Nature Food thanks Malcolm Riley, Donald Rose and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Figure S1. Average carbon and blue water footprint, and land use per kg of food group.

Estimations based on data from Curi-Quinto et al.16 SSB: Sugar-sweetened beverages, kgCO2eq: kilograms of dioxide carbon equivalents, m2: squared meters of land.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Figure S2. The carbon footprint by food groups for HSDG 2023, EAT-HRD-Mex and current adults diet.

ENSANUT: 2016 National Health and Nutrition Survey. HSDG 2023: Mexican Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Guidelines21. EAT-HRD-Mex: EAT Lancet Commission healthy reference diet adapted to the Mexican context22. kgCO2eq: kilograms of dioxide carbon equivalents, SSB: Sugar-sweetened beverages.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 3 Figure S3. The water footprint by food groups for HSDG 2023, EAT-HRD-Mex and current adults diet.

ENSANUT: 2016 National Health and Nutrition Survey. HSDG 2023: Mexican Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Guidelines21. EAT-HRD-Mex: EAT Lancet Commission healthy reference diet adapted to the Mexican context22. L: liters; SSB: Sugar-sweetened beverages.

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 4 Figure S4. Land use by food group for HSDG 2023, EAT-HRD-Mex and current adult diet.

ENSANUT: 2016 National Health and Nutrition Survey. HSDG 2023: Mexican Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Guidelines21. EAT-HRD-Mex: EAT Lancet Commission healthy reference diet adapted to the Mexican context22. m2: squared meters of land, SSB: Sugar-sweetened beverages.

Source data

Supplementary information

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

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Source Data Fig. 3

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Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

Statistical source data.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

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Source Data Extended Data Fig. 3

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Source Data Extended Data Fig. 4

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Unar-Munguía, M., Cervantes-Armenta, M.A., Rodríguez-Ramírez, S. et al. Mexican national dietary guidelines promote less costly and environmentally sustainable diets. Nat Food 5, 703–713 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-01027-5

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