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Shifts towards healthy diets in the US can reduce environmental impacts but would be unaffordable for poorer minorities

Nature Food volume 2, pages 664–672 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Environmental implications of food choice are the focus of increasingly extensive research, but less is known about the impacts of dietary patterns of different socio-economic groups of a country, and the trade-offs between nutritional quality and environmental impacts of diet within those groups. We evaluate the impacts of US household dietary patterns on greenhouse gas emissions, blue water footprint, land use and energy consumption across supply chains using an environmentally extended input–output analysis. We compare the nutritional quality of these dietary patterns using healthy eating index scores across individuals’ income and other socio-economic characteristics. Individuals with higher income or education levels are more likely to adopt healthier diets but are also responsible for larger environmental impacts of diet primarily due to a higher consumption of dairy and livestock products, seafood and items with lower energy density but higher nutrient density. Our optimization shows that a healthy diet with lower environmental impacts is achievable within current food budgets for almost 95% of people, and results in average decreases of 2% in food-related greenhouse gas emissions, 24% in land use and 4% in energy consumption, but a 28% increase in blue water consumption. However, such dietary patterns are unaffordable for 38% of Black and Hispanic individuals in the lowest income and education groups. Policies that affect income and food prices making nutritious food more affordable would be needed to achieve better nutrition and improved environmental outcomes simultaneously, particularly for more vulnerable socio-economic groups.

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Fig. 1: HEI in total and of each HEI component by deciles of income over the 2015–2016 period.
Fig. 2: Environmental impacts per capita and their composition by food group for deciles of income over the 2015–2016 period.
Fig. 3: LMDI decomposition by income groups over the 2015–2016 period.
Fig. 4: Environmental impacts of shifting to healthy diets by income decile based on the data of 2015–2016 period.
Fig. 5: Mosaic plots of the racial and educational level composition of individuals who cannot and can afford the improved diets.

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Data availability

All the data used in this study are publicly available except the 2015 US input–output table, which can be purchased from IMPLAN and is available upon request due to the data use agreement. The NHANES data can be retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/index.htm. The Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion food prices database is available at https://www.fns.usda.gov/resource/cnpp-data. The distribution of cost comes from https://www.bea.gov/industry/industry-underlying-estimates. The FNDDS and FPED databases are available at https://www.ars.usda.gov/northeast-area/beltsville-md-bhnrc/beltsville-human-nutrition-research-center/food-surveys-research-group/docs/. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The NHANES data were processed using R studio (based on R v3.6.1) and Stata v14.0. The input–output analysis was conducted in MATLAB v2018a. The statistical analysis and the LMDI decomposition were completed in Stata v14.0. The optimization was carried out in MATLAB v2018a. The figures were produced in R studio (based on R v3.6.1). All code is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under a Young Scholar Program Grant (71904098) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under a Chinese Postdoc Scientific Grant (2019M650704).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pan He

  2. School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

    Pan He

  3. Department of Geographical Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Kuishuang Feng, Giovanni Baiocchi & Laixiang Sun

  4. School of Finance & Management, SOAS University of London, London, UK

    Laixiang Sun

  5. Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society (IREES), University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

    Klaus Hubacek

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Contributions

P.H., K.F. and G.B. designed the study. P.H. prepared the data and led the analysis. P.H. and G.B. drew the figures. All authors participated in discussing the results and contributed to writing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Pan He, Kuishuang Feng or Giovanni Baiocchi.

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Peer review information Nature Food thanks Gregory Miller, Laura Pereira and Donald Rose for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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He, P., Feng, K., Baiocchi, G. et al. Shifts towards healthy diets in the US can reduce environmental impacts but would be unaffordable for poorer minorities. Nat Food 2, 664–672 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00350-5

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