Greenhouse gas emissions of self-selected individual diets in France: Changing the diet structure or consuming less?

By F. Vieux, N. Darmon, D. Touazi, L. Soler. 2012

310 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The aim was to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) associated with self-selected diets and to evaluate the impact of modifying dietary structures on diet-associated GHGE. Food consumption data from 1918 adults participating in the French national dietary survey and GHGE of 73 highly consumed foods (in g CO2e/100g of edible food) were used to estimate the GHGE of each individual diet. The mean diet-associated GHGE was 4170g CO2e/day and a high inter-individual variability was observed. When the total caloric intakes were reduced to meet the individual energy needs, the diet-associated GHGE decreased by either 10.7% or 2.4%, depending on the assumption made on the average physical activity level of the population. The meat and deli meat food group represented the strongest diet-associated GHGE contributor, but the impact of different meat reduction scenarios was modest. In particular, when fruit and vegetables were iso-calorically substituted for meat, either null or even positive diet-associated GHGE variations were observed because the needed amounts of fruit and vegetables to maintain the caloric content of the diet were high. Therefore, substituting fruit and vegetables for meat (especially deli meat) may be desirable for health but is not necessarily the best approach to decreasing diet-associated GHGE.

Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7cba1b0c068a93d1858583d296708e75262baf6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

1. S. Giljum
2. Johan Six
3. Pete Smith
4. E. Röös
5. G. Carlsson
6. J. Spångberg
7. M. Patel
8. H. Aiking

In Environmental Engineering

1. S. Giljum
2. Karin Schanes
3. Edgar G. Hertwich
4. Johan Six
5. Pete Smith
6. E. Röös
7. G. Carlsson
8. J. Spångberg

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

1. Pete Smith
2. P. Scarborough
3. H. Aiking

Citations in the corpus

• Limiting livestock production to pasture and by-products in a search for sustainable diets (2016, background): “Furthermore, some vegetarian diets are actually more land-demanding (Peters et al., 2007) or climateimpacting (Vieux et al., 2012) than diets with a limited amount of meat.”
• Low carbon lifestyles: A framework to structure consumption strategies and options to reduce carbon footprints (2016, background): “Under the heading of direct reduction, some potential lies in reducing the overall level of food consumption (Vieux et al., 2012) as well as of foods with low nutritional value, such as alcohol, tea, coffee or chocolate (Garnett, 2011).”
• The Impacts of Dietary Change on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Land Use, Water Use, and Health: A Systematic Review (2016, background): “from greatest to least, across ruminant meat, other meat, dairy, and plant-based foods [9, 23, 24, 32, 39, 46, 51, 60, 78].”
• Comparing the sustainability of local and global food products in Europe (2017, background): “The influence on dietary quality of the resulting food choice available could also be negative (Vieux et al., 2012).”
• Exploring dietary guidelines based on ecological and nutritional values: A comparison of six dietary patterns (2014, background): “The average Dutch diet has a greenhouse gas emission of 4.1 kg CO2- eq/day (score 80), and the same figure for the DDG diet is 3.6 kg CO2-eq/day (score 90).”
• Dietary greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans in the UK (2014, background): “; or optimisation programmes have constructed a low-meat diet that meets several pre-determined sustainability and nutritional criteria (Macdiarmid et al. 2012; Vieux et al. 2012; Wilson et al. 2013).”