The design and development of a dashboard for improving sustainable healthy food choices.

Over the last decade, several digital tools have been designed to provide consumers with nutritional and environmental impact information about their food choices post-consumption. Many of these tools lack behavioral change modules, have low user engagement, and ignore inherent environmental nutrition trade-offs to stimulate dietary change. This study presents the design and development of a decision support system to enhance consumer health while meeting sustainability goals from a pre-consumption perspective. The proposed decision support system, Dashboard for Improving Sustainable Healthy (DISH) food choices, employs behavioral features, traffic light labels, and nudges to inform end-users about the nutritional health performance and environmental impact of meals. DISH uses a simple metric that allows end-users to explore the potential minutes of healthy and productive life gained or lost from consuming 100 kcal of a meal. The metric combines the positive or negative nutritional health effects (µ-DALYs) of consuming a meal and environmental damage (endpoint impact expressed in DALYs) on human health. In the DISH application, end-users are rewarded or deducted EnCoins, which represent the number of silver or gold coins lost or gained based on the cost ($) of environmental damage (midpoint impacts) of a meal compared to reference sustainable healthy and unsustainable and unhealthy meal. DISH's gamification module enables end-users to track the potential minutes of healthy and productive life gained/lost and gold or silver rewards or deductions from consuming 100 kcal of a selected meal through cumulative minutes gained or lost and EnCoins. In promoting a sustainable diet culture, the gamification module enables users to create groups and communities where friends and families can track their sustainability performance through meal decisions. The DISH application is currently available online and can be accessed by an end-user through any device. Further pilot studies will focus on testing the technology in partner campus cafeterias.

Nutritional-environmental trade-offs in potato storage and processing for a sustainable healthy diet.

Over the last decade, poor diets and limited access to nutritious foods have been critical drivers of micronutrient deficiency in human health. However, food fortification at an industrialized scale in developed countries has helped eliminate deficiency-related diseases. In developing countries, fortified foods and biofortified materials have been delivered to nutrient-deficient communities. While these strategies have produced significant and acclaimed results, reports from the Food and Agricultural Organization suggest that over a quarter of the world's population suffers from micronutrient deficiency. This implies that there are still declines in micronutrients in food products at different nodes along the food value chain (FVC). Hence, this study sets out to track micronutrient leakages at specific nodes of the FVC using potato household storage, processing, and consumption in the United States as a case study. The experiment was laid out in a full factorial design with three storage conditions (cupboard at (17.5-22.4 °C, 32.7-48% RH), refrigerator at (-1.8 - 0.89 °C, 37.5-66.1% RH) and ideal condition at (7.2-11.1 °C, 85.0-92.4% RH)), two storage times (2 weeks (±3 days) and 5 weeks (±3 days)) and three household processing pathways (boiling in water, baking at 204 °C, and frying in vegetable oil at 149-204 °C). Additionally, we explored the dynamics of optimal household storage and processing pathways by placing a high, low, or equal priority on environmental sustainability or nutrient retention. The results show that storing potatoes for 5 weeks (±3 days) and processing through boiling (in water at 100 °C), baking (at 204 °C), and frying (in vegetable oil at 149-204 °C) are associated with 33.5%, 40.3% and 15.0% greater nutrient loss than a similar processing scenario after 2 weeks (±3 days) of storage. Additionally, storing and processing potatoes after 5 weeks (±3 days) results in approximately 2.2 ± 0.7 times more damage to human health, ecosystem safety, and resource availability than storing and processing potatoes after 2 weeks (±3 days), averaged between the different storage conditions. Storing and processing after 5 weeks (±3 days) results in approximately 53.6 ± 10.3 times more damage to human health, species disappearing per year, and USD loss than freshly purchased and processed potatoes. Perhaps the most significant finding from the study is that storing potatoes in cupboards and boiling (BL-CP pathway) is optimal for achieving a sustainable healthy diet, as it yields the optimal combination of nutrient retention and low environmental damage. Insights from the study could be translated to support consumer decision-making as they weigh the value of environmental sustainability against nutrition in the context of household potato storage and processing.

Transitioning to sustainable healthy diets: A model-based and conceptual system thinking approach to optimized sustainable diet concepts in the United States.

Food production and consumption are essential in human existence, yet they are implicated in the high occurrences of preventable chronic diseases and environmental degradation. Although healthy food may not necessarily be sustainable and vice versa, there is an opportunity to make our food both healthy and sustainable. Attempts have been made to conceptualize how sustainable healthy food may be produced and consumed; however, available data suggest a rise in the prevalence of health-related and negative environmental consequences of our food supply. Thus, the transition from conceptual frameworks to implementing these concepts has not always been effective. This paper explores the relative environmental and health risks associated with highly consumed food groups and develops a methodological workflow for evaluating the sustainability of diet concepts in the context of different health, socio-economic and environmental indicators. In addition, we apply the multi-criteria decision-making techniques (an integrated Analytic Hierarchy Process- Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (AHP-TOPSIS) model) to examine the health and environmental impact of selected sustainable healthy diet concepts implemented in the United States. The principal findings indicate that adopting plant-based diet patterns would benefit the environment and the population's health. However, the up-scale, broad adoption and implementation of these concepts are hindered by critical bottlenecks. Hence we propose potential modification strategies through a conceptual system thinking approach to deliver optimized sustainable diet concepts to aid in the realization of the anticipated benefits of adoption/implementation.