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Growing conversations on climate change in the context of reducing greenhouse gas emissions have sparked more meaningful conversations on dietary diversity, ethical consumption and planetary health in recent years with many celebrities also embracing the “green living” chatter.
In 2019 findings from the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health called for sweeping food system changes by providing the first scientific targets for a healthy diet from a sustainable food production system that operates within planetary boundaries for food. While India’s dietary guidelines developed by the National Institute of Nutrition have a relatively light carbon footprint, even when compared to the EAT-Lancet recommendations, dietary diversity is needed to move rural India towards more nutrition-sensitive food environments, said researchers in two separate studies.
Teasing apart the environmental impacts of national dietary guidelines for seven countries including top greenhouse gas emitters in India and the United States, a recent study by a team of researchers at Tulane University finds that the US recommendations had the highest carbon footprint while India had the smallest. At 3.83 kg carbon dioxide-equivalent per day, the US recommendations was 4.5 times that of the recommended diet for India whose dietary guidelines were equivalent to 0.86 kg carbon dioxide per day.
They compared the national food-based dietary guidelines and food consumption…