Balancing a sustained pursuit of nutrition, health, affordability and climate goals: exploring the case of Indonesia.
To guide the transformation of food systems to provide for healthy and sustainable diets, countries need to assess their current diet and food supply in comparison to nutrition, health, affordability, and environmental goals.
We sought to compare Indonesia's food utilization to diets optimized for nutritional value and cost and to diets that are increasingly plant-based in order to meet further health and environmental goals, including the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet, to explore whether multiple goals could be achieved simultaneously.
We compared 13 dietary scenarios (2 current, 7 optimized, 3 increasingly plant-based, 1 EAT-Lancet) for nutrient content, cost, greenhouse gas emissions (GHGe), and water footprints, using the FAO food balance sheet, Indonesia Household Income and Expenditure Survey household food expenditure, food composition, life cycle assessment, food losses, and trade data.
The diversity of modeled scenarios was higher than that of current consumption, reflecting nutritional deficiencies underlying Indonesia's burden of different forms of malnutrition. Nutrient intake targets were met best by nutrient- and cost-optimized diets, followed by the EAT-Lancet diet. Those diets also had high GHGe, although less than 40% of a scenario in which Indonesia would adopt a typical high-income country's diet. Only the low food chain diet had a GHGe below the 2050 target set by the EAT-Lancet commission. Its nutrient content was comparable to that of a no-dairy diet, slightly above those of fish-and-poultry and current diets, and somewhat below those of the EAT-Lancet diets. To meet nutrient needs, some animal-source foods had to be included. Costs of all except the optimized diets were above the current national average food expenditure. No scenario met all goals simultaneously.
Indonesia's consumption of rice and unhealthy foods should decrease; food production, trade, and processing should prioritize diversification, (bio)fortification, and limiting environmental impacts; and consumer and institutional demands for healthy, nutritious, and sustainable foods should be stimulated. More granular data and tools are required to develop and assess more detailed scenarios to achieve multiple goals simultaneously.
de Pee S
,Hardinsyah R
,Jalal F
,Kim BF
,Semba RD
,Deptford A
,Fanzo JC
,Ramsing R
,Nachman KE
,McKenzie S
,Bloem MW
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Affordability of the EAT-Lancet reference diet: a global analysis.
The EAT-Lancet Commission drew on all available nutritional and environmental evidence to construct the first global benchmark diet capable of sustaining health and protecting the planet, but it did not assess dietary affordability. We used food price and household income data to estimate affordability of EAT-Lancet benchmark diets, as a first step to guiding interventions to improve diets around the world.
We obtained retail prices from 2011 for 744 foods in 159 countries, collected under the International Comparison Program. We used these data to identify the most affordable foods to meet EAT-Lancet targets. We compared total diet cost per day to each country's mean per capita household income, calculated the proportion of people for whom the most affordable EAT-Lancet diet exceeds total income, and also measured affordability relative to a least-cost diet that meets essential nutrient requirements.
The most affordable EAT-Lancet diets cost a global median of US$2·84 per day (IQR 2·41-3·16) in 2011, of which the largest share was the cost of fruits and vegetables (31·2%), followed by legumes and nuts (18·7%), meat, eggs, and fish (15·2%), and dairy (13·2%). This diet costs a small fraction of average incomes in high-income countries but is not affordable for the world's poor. We estimated that the cost of an EAT-Lancet diet exceeded household per capita income for at least 1·58 billion people. The EAT-Lancet diet is also more expensive than the minimum cost of nutrient adequacy, on average, by a mean factor of 1·60 (IQR 1·41-1·78).
Current diets differ greatly from EAT-Lancet targets. Improving diets is affordable in many countries but for many people would require some combination of higher income, nutritional assistance, and lower prices. Data and analysis for the cost of healthier foods are needed to inform both local interventions and systemic changes.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Hirvonen K
,Bai Y
,Headey D
,Masters WA
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《Lancet Global Health》