Growing conversations on climate change in the context of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have sparked more meaningful conversations on dietary diversity, ethical consumption and planetary health in recent years with many celebrities also embracing the ‘green living’ chatter.
In 2019 findings from the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health called for sweeping food system changes by providing the first scientific targets for a healthy diet from a sustainable food production system that operates within planetary boundaries for food. While India’s dietary guidelines developed by the National Institute of Nutrition have a relatively light carbon footprint, even when compared to the EAT-Lancet recommendations, dietary diversity is needed to move rural India towards more nutrition-sensitive food environments, said researchers in two separate studies.
Teasing apart the environmental impacts of national dietary guidelines for seven countries including top GHG emitters India and the United States, a recent study by a team of researchers at Tulane University finds that the U.S. recommendations had the highest carbon footprint while India had the smallest. At 3.83 kg carbon dioxide (CO2)-equivalent per day, the U.S. recommendations was 4.5 times that of the recommended diet for India whose dietary guidelines were equivalent to 0.86 kg CO2 per day.
They compared the national food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) and food consumption patterns of seven countries − Germany, India, the Netherlands, Oman, Thailand, Uruguay, and the United States − to investigate differences in greenhouse gas emissions associated with different dietary guidelines.
The EAT-Lancet recommended diet was also included because that is an international reference that was recently developed to be both health-promoting and environmentally friendly, notes Diego Rose, Professor and Director of Nutrition, School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, Tulane University, the paper’s corresponding author. “India’s guidelines have the lowest carbon footprint from all the ones we studied. Close to half (48 percent) of the footprint is due to the dairy recommendation, about 30 percent come from vegetables, and 13 percent from grains,” Rose told Mongabay-India.
While the U.S. vegetarian dietary guideline is much lower than the main U.S. guideline in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to 1.80 kg CO2 per day), it was still over twice that of India’s largely due to the high U.S. dairy recommendation. The carbon footprint of the US dietary guidelines was found to be about 1.2 times that of the Netherlands (equivalent to 2.86 kg CO2 per day) and about 1.5 times that of Germany (equivalent to 2.25 kg CO2 per day), according to the study.
Rose explains that greenhouse gases are spewed out in the production of foods, whether that be from growing plants or raising animals and the dietary carbon footprint of humans is based on all the impacts of producing all the different foods we eat. “But not all foods are the same; the production of animal foods has a greater impact on the environment than plant foods. India’s guidelines have such a low footprint because their protein food recommendation is all based on plants. Yes, the guidelines make recommendations for dairy, but these foods fill an important nutritional role and are part of a rich cultural tradition.”
Read More at https://india.mongabay.com/2021/06/indias-dietary-guidelines-have-a-relatively-lower-carbon-footprint-study/