Abstract
Background: The current food system has major consequences for the environment and for human health. Alignment of the food policy areas of mitigating climate change and public health will ensure coherent and effective policy interventions for sustaining human health and the environment. This paper explores literature on demand-side policies that aim to reduce consumption of animal-based foods, increase plant-based foods, and reduce overconsumption. Methods: We searched for publications, published between January 2000 and December 2019, considering the above policy domains. Articles were distinguished for type of policy instrument, for topic via keywords and examples were given. Results: The majority of demand-side policies focus on preventing overweight and obesity, using all types of policy instruments including more forceful market-based policies. Hardly any examples of public policies explicitly aiming to lower animal-based foods consumption were found. Policies combining health and sustainability objectives are few and mainly of the information type. Discussion: Moving towards environmentally sustainable and healthy diets is challenging as the implemented demand-side policies focus largely on human health, and not yet on environmental outcomes, or on win-wins. Policies targeting foods from the health perspective can contribute to lower environmental impacts, by indicating suitable animal-based food replacers, and aiming at avoiding overconsumption of energy dense-nutrient poor foods. Preferred policies include a variety of instruments, including strong measures. Conclusions: Working solutions are available to ensure coherent and effective demand side food policies aligning public health and environmental aims. Implementation of aligned and effective policy packages is urgent and needed.
Highlights
A link between healthier school meals and the effect on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) has been assessed by Wickramasinghe et al (2016) showing low GHGE of healthy diets combined with low salt, saturated fatty acids, and added sugar contents [54] (R166)
In Europe, it has been observed that energy-rich, nutrient-poor foods are generally cheaper than nutrient-rich foods [20], and that price promotions are often biased towards less healthy options [55] (R61)
Another way to influence food consumption is through national dietary guidelines, which are developed from a health perspective and give advice for daily food consumption
Summary
The current food system has major consequences for the environment and for human health [1]. Of the total nitrogen and phosphorus inputs via fertilizers, only 15–20% is present in the food that reaches the consumers’ plates, implying large nutrient losses to the environment [9,10]. Trade-offs are identified as well: Public health policies that exclusively aim to increase the consumption of certain foods may cause additional environmental pressure when not combined with lowering the consumption of other foods. Western dietary patterns, dietary patterns such as Mediterranean, vegetarian, or vegan diets generally have lower environmental impacts and are considered more healthy, as these diets contain lower amounts of animal products (especially red and processed meat [16]) and larger amounts of plant-based foods (vegetables and fruits) [17]. Nitrogen use efficiency (edible protein produced per unit of nitrogen) in animal products is around 6–37%, while this is 45–76% for vegetable products, with beef, pork, and dairy having a low efficiency [10]
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