Sustainable and healthy dietary guidelines

This solution was shared by Wageningen University , 19 December 2022

Print date: 14 April 2024 10:32

Description of the innovative solution

Consumer choice Food environment - personal Information/communication Food literacy Behavior change Nutritional guideline Nutrition standard Healthy diet Public-awareness campaign Monitoring/Surveillance Traditional food

Poor diet diversity, inadequate nutrition intake, and food insecurity are major challenges that are aggravated with climate change. To this day, there is no clear definition of a healthy and sustainable diet. Consumers in multiple contexts are faced with daily decisions of what to eat without appropriate recommendations to meet their daily nutrition and energy requirements. Dietary guidelines at national, regional, and local levels should consider a wide range of characteristics when suggesting a healthy diet, such as consumer's income, access to food, and dietary preferences. This solution proposes to develop and measure context-specific sustainable healthy diets that consider the social/cultural, economic, environmental, and determinants of health and nutrition. This could be for instance, a comprehensive dietary guideline toolkit (recommend, implement, measure, monitor, evaluate), or sustainable healthy recipes, or classroom training materials around sustainable and healthier consumption habit. This innovation could be used as a target for nutrition programs in policy to ensure that the recommended healthy diet is accessible, available, affordable and considers the environmental and cultural lens.

Primary users

Peri-urban communities
Schoolstudents
Teachers
Public Health workers
Rural communities
Urban communities
Indigenous communities
Children & youth
Low/Middle income households
Middle/High income households
Academic & Research institutions
Local government (municipalities)
Local populations

Dietary impact

Sustainable and healthy dietary guidelines could promote traditional and indigenous foods by increasing productivity , improving production diversity, and market linkage. This solution could help consumers make informed choices towards improving their daily eating habits. For example, through the suggested dietary guidelines, women who are leading households could meet the daily dietary requirements for their family and themselves with their minimum income and resources.

Planetary impact

Farmers will have an informed decision how to diversity their agricultural production based on the demand of consumers that is shaped by the sustainable healthy guidelines. In addition, vendors and traders are aware of the specific foods that are highly nutritious and environmental friendly that should be accessible for their local community. Finally, families will have better alternative sources of energy for cooking to minimize deforestation and reduce global warming.

Equity impact

Local municipalities and governments could work to ensure that their local communities have access an to these healthy and sustainable dietary options. Public-private partnerships could improve accessibility of a healthy meal by promoting entrepreneurship among local businesses to produce diverse food products that meat the specific demands of the consumers. These altnerative food products could reduce food prices and also trigger the local economy for better jobs and livelihoods.

Main concerns

The traditional methods of producing food is moving away, where policy and industry focuses on maximizing profit and production, over dietary requirements. In addition, small-scale farms are being merged into large hectares of land for large-scale companies and production of specific staple crops (maize, wheat, rice), which is destroying biodiversity and limiting dietary diversity. Also, placing sustainable diets on the policy ahead remains a challenge since decision makers are not aware of the sustainability concept of a healthy diet. Finally, there is a lack of awareness and it is still in its infancy stage to take a food systems approach to improving healthier diet options.

Supply chain segment

Consumers

Maturity level

Moving to scale

Criteria

Food quality Food safety Food availability Food affordability Food desirability Increasing agrobiodiversity

SDG target

SDG 1: No Poverty SDG 2: Zero Hunger SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being

Context

Urban Peri-urban Rural other

Examples and additional resources

Real-world examples

See this solution in action in different contexts and settings around the world

Additional resources

Learn more about this solution through studies, articles, business cases, and other information

Food based dietary guidelines

Report

Ethiopia’s first dietary guidelines were published in 2022. It is anticipated that the guidelines will be revised between 2027 and 2029.

fao.org/nutrition/...thiopia/fr/

Shared by Wageningen University

Methodology for developing and evaluating food-based dietary guidelines and a Healthy Eating Index for Ethiopia: a study protocol

Scientific paper

Food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) are used to promote and maintain healthy eating in a population, by providing country-specific guidance. However, many African countries like Ethiopia do not have FBDGs. This paper describes the methodology for the development of Ethiopian FBDGs and for creating and evaluating a Healthy Eating Index and a scoring tool that can be used to monitor the adherence of the population to FBDGs.

bmjopen.bmj.com/conten...e027846