Environmental and human health trade-offs in potential Chinese dietary shifts

Environmental and human health trade-offs in potential Chinese dietary shifts

Yixin Guo1,8,9, Pan He2,3,8, Tim D. Searchinger1, Youfan Chen4, Marco Springmann5, Mi Zhou4, Xin Zhang6, Lin Zhang4, and Denise L. Mauzerall1,7

1Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08540, USA

2Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100048, China

3School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3AT, UK

4Laboratory for Climate and Ocean–Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking

University, Beijing 100871, China

5Oxford Martin Program on the Future of Food and Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 2JD, UK

6University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Frostburg, MD 21532, USA

7Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, USA

8These authors contributed equally

9Present address: Laboratory for Climate and Ocean–Atmosphere Studies, Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of

Physics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

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Ensuring a secure supply of nutritious food within planetary boundaries is a global challenge, especially for China where improved agricultural practices feed the world’s largest population but create multiple environmental challenges. Chinese diets are shifting toward more meat, fruit, and vegetables, generating compounded environmental and health consequences. Alternative diets have been studied for their climate and health impacts. However, research gaps remain, particularly regarding air pollution from nitrogen fertilizers and livestock manure and land-use change. Here, an analysis of four dietary alternatives is conducted to fill these gaps and finds that a diet high in beef, dairy, and fruit increases environmental effects with limited health benefits; diets with more fruit, vegetables, and legumes substantially reduce diet-related disease burdens but increase environmental effects unless dairy and red meat are reduced; diets that replace red meat with soy create multiple environmental benefits, but only moderate dietary health benefits.

 

 

Dietary shifts from staples toward meats, fruits, and vegetables increase environmental impacts. Excessive red meat intake and micro-nutrient deficiencies also raise health concerns. Previous research examined environmental and health consequences of alternative diets but overlooked impacts on air pollution and land use change. Here we examine implications of four potential Chinese dietary shifts on ammonia and particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon storage loss associated with land-use change, water use, and human health. We show that a diet that replaces red meat with soy benefits the environment and avoids 57,000 PM2.5-related premature deaths annually. Dietary health benefits, however, appear larger with adoption of the Chinese Dietary Guideline (CDG) and EAT-Lancet diets, which prevent over one million premature deaths annually. However, both diets increase water use and GHGs. CDG also increases land use change, but EAT-Lancet reduces it by cutting dairy and red meat. Complex benefits and trade-offs of dietary shifts emphasize the need for further improvements in agricultural management to enable larger health-environment co-benefits.

 

 

Publication details

Guo et al., 2022, One Earth 5, 268–282, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.02.002