The nutritional footprint – An assessment tool for health and environmental effects of nutrition
- 15.11.2014
- English Articles
- Melanie Lukas
- Marie-Louise Scheiper
- Jannick Ansorge
- Holger Rohn
- Christa Liedtke
- Petra Teitscheid
Peer-reviewed | Manuscript received: July 20, 2014 | Revision accepted: October 01, 2014
Introduction – Thinking about nutrition and the environment
Sustainable development includes the objective of reducing the use of resources and should be implemented at all levels of everyday life, including consumption, politics and industry [1]. At the level of private consumption, there are intricate possibilities for improvements in mobility, building and housing, and nutrition [2].
Nutrition is a particularly interesting field of action, as two different points of view are combined. Firstly, there is the subjective individual dimension of individual health and, secondly, the societal debate on future forms of nutrition and the ecological consequences of food production. What is interesting is that both nutritional and environmental sciences suggest that food selection should be modified [3, 4]. There are some products (e.g. meat and meat products) which are thought to be damaging to health when consumed at excessive levels [5–8]. There are other products (e.g. milk and milk products) which should be consumed at adequate, but not excessive, levels [9–11]. Environmental scientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that the consumption of both these groups of products should be reduced for ecological reasons. In this context, the instrument of the nutritional footprint follows the goal of improving the presentation of these correlations.1 In the following sections, the methods employed in this concept are explained. Examples of its use are presented and briefly discussed.
Summary
It is generally accepted that if further progress is to be made towards a societal transformation in the direction of sustainability, the food sector will have to be an important field of action, as it has major environmental consequences – from effects in production, processing, consumption and disposal. As nutritional habits not only induce ecological effects, but also have consequences for consumer health, concepts must be developed that combine ecological and health indicators – but such concepts are scarce. This problem is addressed in the present article. This introduces the instrument of the “nutritional footprint”, an innovative concept that combines four core indicators in each of the two dimensions. Consumers who use this concept obtain an overview of the environmental and health consequences of their nutrition. The nutritional footprint can also be used by companies to administer internal data sets, carry out benchmarking and to improve their external communication.
Keywords: nutritional footprint, health, environment, sustainable nutrition, consumer communication, resource efficiency
