SusDietDONAL

Environmental and health impacts of diets play a significant role in the current debate about a diet that simultaneously promotes human and planetary health. Plant-based dietary patterns have become increasingly societally relevant due to their lower impact on greenhouse-gas emissions (GHGE) and land use (LU) as well as their favourable effects with respect to chronic disease prevention. However, there is considerable variation in plant-based diets in populations, which calls for exploration of environmental and health associations of individual dietary practices to support behaviour change for the societal transformation needed. Next to the overall patterns of plant-based diets, the use of plant-based meat and milk alternatives is becoming increasingly popular, though the environmental and health benefits of such food alternatives as yet are unclear.

The current project will therefore set out to comprehensively investigate variation in plant-based, sustainable dietary patterns in the DONALD Study. First we will examine the variation, determinants, sex differences, age and time trends of the sustainable diet indicators GHGE and LU of the habitual diets reported. Subsequently, we will derive a differentiated food pattern maximising variation in GHGE and LU using the method of reduced rank regression. Thereafter, the human health relevance of this pattern by investigating associations with indicators of cardiometabolic health in young adulthood will be analysed.

We will complement this exploratory work by adopting the EAT-Lancet reference diet, and ‘healthful’ and ‘unhealthful plant-based diets’ to compare environmental impacts and nutritional quality. Finally, we will investigate the use of plant-based dairy and meat alternative food products in the DONALD Study population and evaluate associations with dietary quality, health indicators and GHGE and LU.