Climate friendly diets tend to be good for us

More climate friendly diets are also healthier, according to a study examining the carbon footprint of what more than 16,000 Americans eat in a day.

The research, which recently appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is the first to compare the climate impact and nutritional value of US diets using real-world data about what Americans say they are eating.

“People whose diets had a lower carbon footprint were eating less red meat and dairy—which contribute to a larger share of greenhouse gas emissions and are high in saturated fat—and consuming more healthful foods like poultry, whole grains, and plant-based proteins,” says lead author Diego Rose, a professor of nutrition and food security at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.

Because food production is a major contributor to climate change, researchers from Tulane and the University of Michigan sought to learn more about the impacts of Americans’ daily dietary choices. They built an extensive database of the greenhouse gas emissions related to the production of foods and linked it to a large federal survey that asked people what they ate over a 24-hour period.

Researchers ranked diets by the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per 1,000 calories consumed and divided them into five equal groups. Then they rated the nutritional value of foods consumed in each diet using the US Healthy Eating Index, a federal measure of diet quality, and compared the lowest to the highest-impact groups on this and other measures.

Diets in the highest impact group accounted for five times the emissions of those in the lowest impact group. The highest impact diets had greater quantities of meat (beef, veal, pork, and game), dairy, and solid fats per 1,000 calories than the low-impact diets. Overall, the high-impact diets were more concentrated in total proteins and animal protein foods. A companion study the researchers released earlier this year found that 20 percent of Americans accounted for almost half of US diet-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Americans in the lowest carbon footprint group ate a healthier diet, as measured by this index. However, these climate friendly diets also contained more of some low-emission items that aren’t healthy, namely added sugars and refined grains. They also had lower amounts of important nutrients—such as iron, calcium, and vitamin D—likely because of the lower intakes of meat and dairy.

Overall, diets in the lowest impact group were healthier, but not on all measures. Rose says this is because diets are complex with many ingredients that each influence nutritional quality and environmental impacts. “This explains the nuanced relationship we observed between these outcomes,” he says.

Rose hopes the research will help the public and policymakers recognize that improving diet quality can also help the environment.

“We can have both. We can have healthier climate friendly diets and reduce our food-related emissions,” Rose says. “And it doesn’t require the extreme of eliminating foods entirely. For example, if we reduce the amount of red meat in our diets, and replace it with other protein foods such as chicken, eggs, or beans, we could reduce our carbon footprint and improve our health at the same time.”