Food Sustainability

Combined Nutritional and Environmental LCA of Food

About this project

The overarching aim of the project is to provide innovative methodologies and indices that generate science-driven data to inform healthy and sustainable dietary choices and substitutions. We comprehensively evaluation 7,000 “as consumed” food items from the US diet using the Health Nutritional Index (HENI) that evaluates the healthiness of in minutes of healthy life per serving and life cycle assessment to calculate carbon footprint. We lose 35 minutes of life per hot-dog and gain 25 minutes per serving of nuts.

People

Katerina Stylianou (kstylian@umich.edu)

Olivier Jolliet (ojolliet@umich.edu)

Victor L Fulgoni II (Nutrition Impact LLC)

Keywords

Food, sustainable diet, milk, fruit and vegetables, nutrition impacts and benefits, pesticides, carbon footprint, health, life cycle assessment

Project Summary

We are facing multiple challenges related to agriculture and food systems. The need for sustainable food choices for the well-being of humanity and the planet is now more evident than ever before. However, we currently lack comprehensive metrics that evaluate foods by accounting for both their environmental and nutritional effects.

The aims of this project are:

1. Develop a comprehensive framework that enables the comparison of environmental and nutritional impacts of foods and diets on health

2. Develop health-burden based nutritional assessment tool (HENI: Health Nutritional Index)

3. Develop a rigorous approach that enables the consistent evaluation of the environmental impacts of “as consumed” foods using life cycle assessment

4. Evaluate and compare the nutritional health benefits and damages and environmental impacts of food items in the U.S. diet and provide recommendations for foods to increase or to decrease

5. Propose effective food substitutions in priority to maximize health and environmental benefits.

Building on the work from the Global Burden of disease and approaching the problem from a life cycle assessment (LCA) perspective, we developed the Combined Nutritional and Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (CONE-LCA) framework that evaluates and compares in parallel the environmental and nutritional effects of foods or diets in a common metric, disability adjusted life years (DALYs; Figure 1).

Figure 1. Graphical representation of the CONE-LCA framework. (Source: Stylianou et al., 2016, IJLCA, 21:734–746)

In a proof of concept case study, we employed the CONE-LCA framework and evaluated the environmental and nutritional health effects of adding one serving of milk to the average US diet so as to meet dietary recommendations. We found that this dietary change could result in a health benefit for American adults, and the benefits further increased when milk substituted a health detrimental beverage such as sugar-sweetened beverages (Figure 2). This was the first study of its kind to bring on the same scale environmental and nutritional health impacts and highlight the importance of nutritional health impact consideration in food life cycle assessment.

Figure 2. Comparison of daily environmental impacts (climate change and particulate matter) and nutritional effects for three dietary changes scenarios of adding a serving of milk to the average U.S. diet. (Source: Stylianou et al., 2016, IJLCA, 21:734–746)

To expand this approach to all food items, we developed nutritional characterization factor and a database of food nutritional composition to be used in LCA. The product of this work is the novel Health Nutritional Index (HENI) to measure the health potential of as-consumed-foods in marginal minutes of healthy life gained or lost, based on epidemiological evidence for 16 dietary risk factors. For LCA, health burden can be reported in DALYs using the DALY Nutritional Index (DANI). We applied this framework to evaluate the performance of 7,000 food items in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Figure 3 illustrated the approach using the example of a veggie and a meat burrito.

Figure 3. Nutritional inventory flows (a) and corresponding health impacts (b) of a meat and veggie burrito (Source: Weidema and Stylianou, 2016, IJLCA, 1-7)

Publications

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Fulgoni, V., Wallace, T., Stylianou, K. and Jolliet, O., 2018. Calculating Intake of Dietary Risk Components Used in the Global Burden of Disease Studies from the What We Eat in America/National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. Nutrients, 10(10), p.1441.
Stylianou, K.S., Heller, M.C., Fulgoni, V.L., Ernstoff, A.S., Keoleian, G.A. and Jolliet, O., 2016. A life cycle assessment framework combining nutritional and environmental health impacts of diet: A case study on milk. The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, 21(5), pp.734-746.

Published conference proceedings and abstracts

Stylianou, K.S., Nguyen, V.K., Fulgoni III, V.L. and Jolliet, O., 2018, August. An Exposome-Based Approach to Environmental and Nutritional Impacts of Food on Human Health. In ISEE Conference Abstracts (Vol. 2018, No. 1).
Stylianou, K.S., Fulgoni, V.L. and Jolliet, O., 2018. Abstract P226: HEalth Nutritional Index (HENI): A Health Burden Based Tool for Food and Diet Nutritional Evaluation. Circulation, 137(suppl_1), pp.AP226-AP226.
Stylianou, K.S., Nguyen, V.K., Fulgoni III, V.L. and Jolliet, O., 2017. Environmental Impacts of Mixed Dishes: A Case Study on Pizza. The FASEB Journal, 31(1_supplement), pp.lb386-lb386.
Stylianou, K.S., Fantke, P., Fulgoni III, V.L. and Jolliet, O., 2017. Comprehensive Assessment of Human Health Impacts and Benefits of Fruits and Vegetables in a LCA Context. The FASEB Journal, 31(1_supplement), pp.lb387-lb387.
Stylianou, K.S., Fantke, P. and Jolliet, O., 2016. Combined nutritional and environmental life cycle assessment of fruits and vegetables. In 10th International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment of Food 2016.

Presentations

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