Are you looking for new reasons to cut back on “junk” food? In addition to the obvious health benefits, I demonstrated in recent research that unhealthy or unhealthy foods make up a significant proportion of diet-related environmental pollution.
For the average Australian household, my research found that freely available food contributes 33-39% to water use, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and land.
Why is that a problem? In a warming world with a growing population and dwindling resources, we can no longer afford the inappropriate consumption that is detrimental to our health and the health of the planet.
While sustainable nutrition is becoming increasingly popular, the debate and proposed guidelines do not sufficiently cast doubt on the prevalence of fast food using scarce resources to generate empty calories.
Sustainable and healthy
The global food system accounts for about 25% of greenhouse gas emissions, 70% of water consumption and 38% of land use. We urgently need to achieve our climate goals and ensure food security. However, there is a growing recognition that increasing agricultural efficiency (to produce more food with fewer resources) is not enough. Therefore, a more sustainable diet is very important.
National dietary guidelines are designed to help us eat healthier. Recent reruns in Brazil, Sweden and the Netherlands have also emphasized the importance of health and resilience.
Foods of animal origin usually have a greater environmental impact than plant foods. This is due to the large amounts of soil, water and forage needed to raise livestock, and the methane released by ruminants.
Therefore, many of the recommendations for healthy and sustainable eating properly focus on the need to reduce consumption of meat and animal products.
A diet like the Mediterranean, rich in vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, seems to strike the right balance between health and sustainability. The main characteristic of the traditional Mediterranean diet is the limited number of foods that can be chosen freely.
Go to the trash
The Australian Dietary Guidelines describe free food as: “Food and drink that is not necessary to provide the body with the nutrients it needs, but can provide variety. Many of them are high in saturated fat, sugar, salt and/or alcohol.”
In contrast, non-discretionary foods are those that fall into the most important food groups: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, dairy products, and unprocessed meats.
We all know food additives are unhealthy, but how do we compare different products in terms of environmental impact?
There is a serious lack of research to measure the environmental impact of these foods. We assume that the more processes our food goes through, the greater the overall impact due to cumulative energy and other input requirements.
However, my research suggests that this is dependent on a number of factors – an issue that has been highlighted in other research on the overall impact of diet on the environment. Junk food almost always uses more energy, but land and water use varies from product to product. Work in this area is still ongoing.
However, this variability should not interfere with unwanted food, especially given its contribution to obesity. The question is whether these foods are consumed in excess or have replaced staple foods – as can be the case for poorer socioeconomic groups.
The average energy intake of most Australians is above the recommendations for their age and activity level. That is, we need to eliminate excessive energy consumption and consider unhealthy food as a form of food waste.
When less available food is produced, it means more unprocessed ingredients are offered in a more nutritious form, or less agricultural production is needed. Both can reduce the impact on the environment.
What can we do to fight it?
Well it’s tricky, the solution ultimately has to deal with the nature of the problem, which is why we go overboard with this food in the first place.
Promoting dietary change through unwanted food is a challenge because of its cheapness, taste, and convenience. Free food is also advertised aggressively to consumers because of its high profits.
This last point embodies what is fundamentally wrong with our nutritional system and why it shouldn’t maintain proper health and resilience. While carefully selected food taxes and subsidies, along with better labeling and advertising restrictions on fast food, can help reduce its consumption, these consumer-centric measures are only part of the solution.
Food manufacturers must ultimately be held accountable for distributing cheap, freely available food. We must promote the elimination of unhealthy and unsustainable products through regulation and public pressure, following the example of action to combat climate change.
As developing countries continue to shift to more western diets, food consumption patterns are likely to become more environmentally intensive.
In order to sustainably feed more people, we must reduce the surplus not only by reducing the consumption of animal products, but also by combating the overconsumption of freely available food and the waste that comes with it.