A method to rapidly match environmental impact data to > 60 dietary datasets

Abstract

There is growing interest in assessing the environmental impacts of diets due to the awareness of food consumption consequences on human health and ecological systems. A limiting factor in this field has been linking information on the environmental impacts of foods to detailed individual-level dietary data that reflect the food consumption habits of people. Here we present i) a method of linking environmental impact data from a meta-analysis to a food description and classification system; ii) a resulting dataset of environmental impact values matched to 4089 food descriptors; and iii) an example of applying this data to assess the environmental footprints of the Brazilian and USA diets. Our methodology accelerates the assignment of environmental impact values to foods reported in dietary surveys from different countries, and can be used by researchers, policy makers, practitioners and consumers to inform the promotion of healthy diets from sustainable food systems.