Creating and supporting a healthy food environment

At a community level, evidence increasingly suggests an association between the local food environment and diabetes. Buyun Liu,  Yangbo Sun and Wei Bao comment on a large study in the UK  by Sarkar and colleagues that shows the need for creating and supporting a healthy food environment in multi-level intervention efforts for prevention of type 2 diabetes. Understanding the effects of food environment on human health could provide the information and evidence necessary for top-down approaches, such as public policy and legal solutions, to improve the health and wellbeing of populations.

In a separate study Marco Springmann and colleagues conclude that updating national dietary guidelines to reflect the latest evidence on healthy eating can by itself be important for improving health and reducing environmental impacts and can complement broader and more explicit criteria of sustainability concludes a study which examined three different approaches to sustainable diets motivated by environmental, food security, and public health objectives.

The modelling analysis found that energy-balanced, low-meat dietary patterns in line with available evidence on healthy eating led to an adequate nutrient supply for most nutrients, and large reductions in premature mortality (reduction of 19% [95% CI 18–20] for the flexitarian diet to 22% [18–24] for the vegan diet). It also markedly reduced environmental impacts globally (reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 54–87%, nitrogen application by 23–25%, phosphorus application by 18–21%, cropland use by 8–11%, and freshwater use by 2–11%) and in most regions, except for some environmental domains (cropland use, freshwater use, and phosphorus application) in low-income countries.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplan/article/PIIS2542-5196(18)30206-7/