Food Bytes: November 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

I thought I would write up the November Food Bytes before the onslaught of publications leading up to the COP28 climate meeting takes place. Here is the roundup!

Some interesting articles and books:

The great “godfather of climate science,” Jim Hansen, also a Columbia colleague, has put out a paper with colleagues arguing the planet may be warming faster than previous estimates have indicated by measuring “climate sensitivity” – measuring the earth’s warmth via atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Global CO2 levels hovered around 280 parts per million in the pre-industrial age. Now, they are above 400 ppm. Not everyone agrees with this paper, but no matter, Hansen is sending us clear warnings.

We are more and more worried about how resilient our food systems are in the face of extreme events and shocks, be they climate, environmental, or political. This paper examines the impacts of crop yields related to several agriculture input shocks – nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, machinery, pesticide, and fertilizer. Industrialized agriculture systems depend on these inputs, and often, they are imported from other countries. When combined, as you can see in the figure, some areas showed decreased yields for some but not all crops. The yields of barley, maize, potato, and wheat decreased heavily in the western United States. Barley, maize, millet, potato, sorghum, and soybean yields all decreased in northern Argentina, while barley, maize, potato, and wheat. To some extent, sugar beet also saw large yield decreases in Central Europe. Rice yields, in turn, decreased heavily in Thailand, Vietnam, and the southern part of India.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-023-00873-z/figures/3

My friend Bill Dietz, the Director of Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at George Washington University, and I just published a paper on how the U.S. agri-food sector can contribute to climate change mitigation. The paper is timely for the upcoming COP28 meetings. The U.S. needs to step up!

A new book on the political economy of food system transformation co-edited by Danielle Resnick and Johan Swinnen has been jointly published by IFPRI and Oxford University Press. The summary follows: “The current structure of the global food system is increasingly recognized as unsustainable. While the need to transform food systems is widely accepted, the policy pathways for achieving such a vision often are highly contested, and the enabling conditions for implementation are frequently absent.” Check it out and download it for free here.

Some interesting reports:

Every year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, also known as FAO, releases two flagship reports: the SOFI and the SOFA. The SOFA just came out this past week and focuses on the “true cost of food.” That means they assess the hidden environmental, health, and social costs of producing our food. What is their final assessment? Global hidden costs of food amount to 10 trillion dollars, with low-income countries bearing the highest burden of hidden costs. Yikes.

The Global Alliance for the Future of Food released an interesting analysis in this report calling for food systems to wean off fossil fuels. Wouldn’t that be nice….They argue that food production, distribution, processing/packaging, storage, and sales consume about 15% of all fossil fuels generated annually. They argue that the fossil fuel industry holds a lot of sway with governments, making it difficult to “extract” (sorry for the pun) their influence or hold them to account.

A report by the group I-CAN, which looks at the integration of climate and nutrition, came out. It is interesting…nothing new…and much built on the long scientific publications already out there, but I supposed putting it in a layperson report gets the message out there.

Some interesting listens:

Vice did an “expose” on how the Italian mafia has taken over food systems in Italy. Having lived in Italy and interested in Italian deep food traditions, I watched it. The document is not well done, with much speculation and little evidence beyond a few interviews. If it is even true, I wasn’t convinced by this documentary.

John Oliver’s Halloween episode focused on the issues of child labor related to producing chocolate – focusing on Ghana and the Ivory Coast, where roughly 60% of it is produced. A lot of the material is borrowed from Netflix’s Rotten series. Still, the message is clear that many children (1.56 million) are engaged in cocoa production stemming from insufficient wages paid by massive confectionary companies to smallholder farming families working or owning cocoa farms, leaving them in gut wrenching poverty. Such a tragedy. I don’t think John Oliver adds much to the debate – if you want a quick watch, go to the Netflix episode.

In their usual snarky, pick-it-to-pieces style, Mike and Aubrey of the fantastic Maintenance Phase podcast sink their teeth into Ozempic, the weight loss diabetes treatment drug. It's well worth listening to the latest.

I'll just stay here

I write this blog, having been recently infected with COVID. The first time was in May of 2022. This time around, I am a little worse for the wear, but it allows me, through a foggy haze, to contemplate this pesky and resilient virus on its almost fourth anniversary since hearing about its emergence in Wuhan.

I traveled on a plane five times since March 2020, when most of the world shut down from COVID-19. Three of the trips were to Italy — Bologna, Puglia, and Bellagio. The other two were to Seattle and Switzerland. To put this globetrotting footprint into perspective, I would travel on average about ten international flights a year before the pandemic. In those three and a half years, my average was 1.5 trips a year. Don’t get me wrong. The ability to travel and see the world is truly a privilege. We travel to find ourselves, to discover new places, and to understand humanity. I was fortunate to travel to some very faraway places before social media, iPhones, and Instagram, in which everywhere and everything is distilled down to a “been there down that” disposable, bragable moment. They were the best times of travel - conveniences but without the crowds.

From the paper by Ripple et al 2023

I share my travelogue history during the pandemic with you because the one thing COVID-19 forced upon many of us was to stay put. While I don’t think the world has deeply reflected enough about the impacts of the pandemic on our society (particularly the loss of life and suffering), the lessons learned, and the murky path forward, the world did pause (and was truly quieter), and this respite did wonders, at least temporarily, for Mother Earth. Just look at these figures of air transport and greenhouse gas emissions per capita in 2020 and the dip. A flight from London to New York is about 1,000 kg (1 ton) of carbon dioxide. There are crude and somewhat flawed comparisons to relate this footprint to other activities like household electricity consumption, driving a car, and eating hamburgers. Just know, this is a lot. To put the flight emissions into perspective, the U.S., on average, produces about 16 tons of carbon a year (the world average is 4). The world needs to move towards 2 tons per year by 2050. Travel is a significant component of the U.S.’s emissions.

As I see it, my time of heavy travel is over. It is now the next generation’s turn to see the world and for the world to see them while they can. It will get more complicated to travel. It already is. It will become less fun and full of hassle, and it will further exhibit inequities. There will be places that will be incredibly difficult to travel to — too hot, too dangerous, too constrained.

When I think about the limits of travel and time spent over these last four years, this spoken word song Nirvana, comes to mind. It is told by Tom Waits — a master singer-songwriter who croons conversational late-night stories through songs — on his Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards album. Waits poignantly, but always in keeping with his guttural delivery, recites a poem of the same name by Charles Bukowski about a young man who, for a moment, is lost in the magic of a cafe in a small town he is passing through. At one point, the man thinks: “I’ll just sit here, I’ll just stay here.” But he doesn’t. He boards the Greyhound bus once again and moves on, and no one, except him, even noticed the magic of that somewhere town.

In the Nirvana story, the weary traveler longs for a place to call home and hang his hat. He seems lost and is searching for the magic that life has not yet offered him. That is why we travel, yes? I sought after that magic when I journeyed — that place where one can say, “Everything was beautiful there, that it would always stay beautiful there.” And while through all of my travels, there have been many experiences, instances, and glimpses of beauty and enchantment, it gets harder for me to want more. Instead, I will embrace the magic I picked up along the way and “just stay here.”

Food Bytes: October 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (ALMOST) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

 

It is hard to find the time to read, let alone write about what you read. One of the things about reading scientific literature is that you have to weed through many journals’ tables of contents to find the nibbles and nuggets that are worth your time. Sometimes, you get lucky and find some gems; other times, you don’t get further than the abstract. Regardless, if you don’t have LinkedIn or X, spoon-feeding your biased and “like-minded lemur” content, the never-ending search for quality papers is laborious and time-consuming.

Enter documentaries and podcasts. I find myself more and more listening to them to get a synthesis of a topic or a deep dive into an issue or scientific discovery. There is no shortage of food podcasts, but most focus on cooking and gourmandery. But a few goodies discuss the politics of food and the history of food. I try to add them to the Resource section of The Food Archive. I found this particular episode of the podcast, “What You’re Eating,” fantastic on the confusion of egg labels. The host lays out the issues and clarifies where your eggs come from and how to understand the labels on those confusing cartons better.

Two food documentaries worth the watch are Poisoned and How to Live to 100, Wherever You Are in the World. Let’s take Poisoned first, about how “unsafe” the U.S. food supply is, although often touted as being one of the most secure. The documentary starts with the contaminated burgers from Jack in the Box, which killed and sickened a slew of people. After lawsuits and regulations, getting sick from E. coli-contaminated hamburger meat is hard now. It shows that it works once governments can set their mind to something and put in strict and enforced regulations. Enter vegetables. After watching the show, I am not sure I will ever eat romaine lettuce again…much of it is grown right next to concentrated animal feed operations (where beef is raised in the U.S.). The manure runs off into waterways,  and the water from those said waterways irrigates the nearby lettuce crops. And then bingo! You’ve got severe contamination issues. It is worth watching to understand how food is produced in this country, how it is regulated, and how you can be safer with food in your kitchen.

How to Live to 100 is hosted by Dan Buettner, who wrote Secrets of the Blue Zones. He has been studying why, in some places, people live such long lives – sometimes beyond 100 years. He travels to Okinawa, Japan; Ikaria, Greece; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California — where more people live significantly longer than average. He summarizes some of their secrets to longevity into four basic mantras. Keep in mind these populations all get to their winter years in different, contextualized ways, and it is never that straightforward why someone lives a long life and others die too early. Dan argues these four lifestyle changes help:

  • Make movement a habit

  • Have a positive outlook

  • Eat wisely

  • Find and connect with your tribe

There are a lot of valuable lessons in this documentary (sans Dan showing himself riding his bike for 1/3 of the docuseries. Why do documentarians always have to show themselves so much? I digress…). One lesson is that no matter how long you live, you can live your best life and one of high quality. A lot of that centers around food. And wine. Yay!

The NY Times Magazine had two fantastic articles last week. David Wallace-Wells wrote a piece on the financial responsibility for climate change and how difficult it is to figure out the historical tally of damage. The price of historical emissions and removing carbon would cost $250 trillion. The U.S. alone has accrued a climate debt of $2 trillion. By 2100, $100 trillion. This shows how daunting it will be to turn around the damage we have done and will continue to do without serious action on climate change.

Another NY Times Magazine article focuses on young migrant kids from Central America who work night shifts in slaughterhouses – a dangerous, low-paying job – with very little compensation or legal status. They are often too tired when they get to school after working long, laborious hours all night, and often, they get maimed, injured, or exposed to terrible toxins that stay with them for a lifetime. It is a tragic story but so important to read to understand why younger kids and teens are trekking up to the U.S., what they face along the way and when they get here, and the fine line to ensuring their freedom. While it seems we have come a long way from the days of The Jungle, written in 1906 by Upton Sinclair of the Chicago slaughterhouses, this article makes you pause. Your heart will break for Marcos Cux.

And for some self-promotion, my team and colleagues published a few papers in the last six months that may be of interest to Food Archive readers:

  • Challenges and opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of food reformulation and fortification to improve dietary and nutrition outcomes: This article is about how reformulation and fortification face numerous technical and political hurdles for food manufacturers and will not solve the issues of increased consumption of ultra-processed foods. You can’t make junk food healthier at the end of the day…

  • Harnessing the connectivity of climate change, food systems, and diets: Taking action to improve human and planetary health: This paper presents how climate change is connected to food systems and how dietary trends and foods consumed worldwide impact human health, climate change, and environmental degradation. It also highlights how specific food policies and actions related to dietary transitions can contribute to climate adaptation and mitigation responses and, at the same time, improve human and planetary health. While there is significant urgency in acting, it is also critical to move beyond the political inertia and bridge the separatism of food systems and climate change agendas currently existing among governments and private sector actors. The window is closing and closing fast.

  • A global view of aquaculture policy: This article shows that government policies have strongly influenced the geographic distribution of aquaculture growth, as well as the types of species, technology, management practices, and infrastructure adopted in different locations. Six countries/regions are highlighted – The EU, Bangladesh, Zambia, Chile, China, USA, and Norway. These case studies shed light on aquaculture policies aimed at economic development, aquaculture disease management, siting, environmental performance, and trade protection. 

  • Riverine food environments and food security: a case study of the Mekong River, Cambodia: Rivers are critical, but often overlooked, parts of food systems. They have multiple functions supporting the surrounding communities' food security, nutrition, health, and livelihoods. However, given current unsustainable food system practices, damming, and climate change, most of the world’s largest rivers are increasingly susceptible to environmental degradation, with negative implications for the communities that rely on them. Rivers are dynamic and multifaceted food environments (i.e., the place within food systems where people obtain their food) and their role in securing food security, including improved diets and overall health.

Building Stronger Food Systems in the Face of Global Shocks

I recently wrote a report for the Farm Journal Foundation on the current global food system crisis and the U.S.'s role in supporting small-scale producers by ramping up agricultural development assistance. A summary is below, and the full report can be found here.

Over the past few years, the world has faced a series of unprecedented shocks that have pushed farmers and our global food system to the breaking point. The COVID-19 pandemic, international and regional conflicts, including the war between Russia and Ukraine, and extreme weather events caused by climate change have come together to create a true “polycrisis” – significantly impacting food, fertilizer, feed, fuel, and finance available to farmers. These challenges have been extremely difficult in their own right, but worst still, they have left humanity vulnerable to any future “black swan” moments that could have severe and far-reaching consequences for global food supplies.

Recent shocks have led to high food prices and worsening hunger and malnutrition around the world. This polycrisis has disproportionately negatively impacted small-scale producers and people living in low-income, food-deficit countries who spend most of their incomes on food. Smallholders generally have low levels of agricultural productivity, high exposure to climate change and other threats, scarce assets, and poor access to information, technology, markets, and services – increasing their vulnerability to shocks.

Because Russia and Ukraine are major crop producers and fertilizer suppliers, a key input to help smallholder farmers increase their crop yields, the war between the two countries has significantly impacted global food and nutrition security. Trade bottlenecks, initially caused by the COVID-19 pandemic but compounded by the Russia-Ukraine war, have further exacerbated the crisis. Structural challenges to food systems in developing countries, including farmers’ lack of access to markets and finance, poor storage and transportation infrastructure, which contribute to food loss and waste, and persistent disempowerment of women in agriculture, mean that countless farmers and food producers were already teetering on the edge of survival; additional burdens stemming from the polycrisis have pushed many into disaster. Consumers around the world have also faced enormous pressure, as disrupted agricultural supplies have led to rising food prices and lower availability and affordability of nutritious foods. New research has shown that even modest increases in the prices of staple foods leads rapidly to negative nutrition impacts from deteriorating diet quality as low-income families shift away from more nutritious and expensive foods, including vegetables, fish, and eggs, in order to afford the increased costs of rice, wheat, maize, or other dietary staples.

A global map of the number of people with acute food insecurity, mid-2022

Through its whole-of-government Feed the Future initiative, the U.S. has an important role in enabling farmers and food systems in developing countries to withstand shocks better. Supporting global food and nutrition security is in America’s best interest both from an economic and national security standpoint. Studies show that U.S. investment in international agricultural development, research, and innovation benefits both developing countries and U.S. producers and consumers, far exceeding its costs.

Key Recommendations

Agricultural research and development (R&D) can help developing countries address their own unique challenges and shore up local food systems to withstand shocks better. Unfortunately, there have been significant decreases in inflation-adjusted U.S. and multilateral investment in food systems R&D to countries and universities in recent years, and important institutions, including CGIAR have seen fluctuations in research funding.

The U.S. government is uniquely positioned to lead investments in international agricultural research by virtue of its unparalleled capacity from the federal, university, private sectors and to generate benefits that would simultaneously help smallholder farm families around the world and American farmers and ranchers. The U.S. can strengthen its portfolio by providing additional resources to initiatives such as CGIAR, U.S. Feed the Future Innovation Labs, and the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), and by partnering with institutions with long histories of designing and delivering research for development overseas, such as the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Within this context, the U.S. should consider targeting additional research funding toward the following areas to increase impact:

  1. Climate change adaptation and mitigation: The impact of climate change on agriculture is expected to intensify in coming years, and more investments are needed to improve smallholder resilience, productivity, and incomes. Areas that need increased research investment include drought-resistant crop varieties, better on-farm water management and improved irrigation, more precise fertilizer application, and additives to cattle feed to improve feed efficiency and/or reduce enteric methane emissions.

  2. Soil health and nutrient management: More research is needed into solutions that can reduce global dependence on Russian fertilizer. The U.S. should consider investing in R&D and partnering with the private sector to develop and scale up green fertilizer, biofertilizers, fertilizer alternatives, and innovations that boost fertilizer efficiency and nutrient uptake.

  3. Crop diversity and nutrition: Low productivity, high production risks, and insufficient diversification towards producing more nutritious foods are critical drivers of the elevated cost of healthy diets, especially in low-income countries. More research should focus on developing sustainable and scalable production methods for various crops, including fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, improved forages for climate-smart animal nutrition, and where appropriate, biofortification and fortification of crops and food. In addition, more research is needed to improve the affordability of animal-source foods, such as fish, eggs, and dairy, that would enhance both nutrition and livelihoods.

  4. Access to markets and finance, especially for women: Research could focus on how to address barriers to smallholders’ access to credit and market information, ways to develop new market linkages, innovative financing models, and partnerships with development banks to expand lending to farmers, and how to improve farmer organizations’ capacity to negotiate with buyers.

  5. Supply chain infrastructure: Inadequate food storage, poor road infrastructure, limited food preservation capacity, and the lack of physical access to food markets, especially for perishable foods, lead to significant food losses and inefficiencies along supply chains in many developing countries. Innovations focused on the infrastructure needs of small-scale producers and strategies developed to address those needs could help attract additional investment on-farm and across the entire food system.

  6. Local capacity building: Giving voice and agency to local producers allows for their participation and leadership in R&D funding and prioritization decisions. Without their engagement from the start, adoption of technologies and other R&D tools produced could be futile. It is also critical to ensure that R&D investments do not cause unintended negative consequences, burdens, or harms, particularly for women who already face significant hurdles.

Food Bytes: March 2023 Edition

FOOD BYTES IS A (Almost) MONTHLY BLOG POST OF “NIBBLES” ON ALL THINGS CLIMATE, FOOD, NUTRITION SCIENCE, POLICY, AND CULTURE.

So much going on in food and nutrition these days that it is hard to keep up. In looking at what has been published in the last month, three areas dominate ultra-processed foods, climate change, and blue foods. Let’s take each and highlight the latest and the greatest.

Ultra-processed foods: What are ultra-processed foods (UPFs), may you ask? Basically, junk food. But we scientists have to come up with fancy terms and categorize everything. UPFs are a very broad category of foods that generally are made from highly processed, industrialized ingredients not found in the home or in restaurant kitchens. These foods are designed to be hyper-palatable, often conveniently ready-to-eat, shelf-stable, transportable, strongly marketed, and, ultimately, highly profitable. More and more research shows that these foods are detrimental to various health outcomes (obesity, diabetes, cancer, morbidity, mental health, etc.) and could be potentially addictive and environmentally destructive. California, which always leads in food governance (blame it on the hippies), is growing worried about what exactly these foods contain. They are considering banning a number of staple ingredients found in these foods. I cannot even begin to source the sheer amount of literature coming out demonstrating the impact of these devilish foods, but here, here, and here are a few good systematic or meta-reviews. This Wired layperson article is a good summary. If you want to read two people who lead in the science of UPFs, read Carlo Montiero or Kevin Hall. Regardless of all the science coming out, their sales are increasing across almost every region of the world. Why? Well, they are cheap, have a long shelf life, are easily stored and transported for long periods of time, and are damn tasty.

IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, 2023: Key Summary Figure

Climate and food: Hard too to keep up with everything going on. The most significant update is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, has come out with a synthesis report on how much time we have left before the world falls apart. They are surprisingly and cautiously optimistic, arguing that there is still time to address climate change before things start “gettin’ hot in here.” Food is heavily featured in this synthesis report, thanks to our AgMIP friends at Columbia University. They argue that food security and nutrition are and will continue to be significantly impacted, particularly in resource-constrained settings and among smallholder farmers. They also offer a range of mitigation and adaptation strategies, including agriculture, forestry, and other land use (AFOLU) options with reduced deforestation in tropical regions, shifting to sustainable healthy diets, reducing food loss/waste and intensifying sustainable agriculture (they even mention urban ag!).

When I asked Google’s new AI system, Bard, what was the latest science published in “food systems” in the last week, this is what they spit out:

Here are some recent research on food systems:

  • A new study found that the global food system is responsible for about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions. The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the food system's emissions are mainly caused by the production of meat and dairy products, as well as the transportation of food.

  • A new study found that the global food system is also responsible for about one-third of all water use. The study, published in the journal Nature Water, found that the food system's water use is mainly caused by the irrigation of crops, as well as the production of meat and dairy products.

  • A new study found that the global food system is also responsible for about one-third of all land use. The study, published in the journal Nature Land, found that the food system's land use is mainly caused by the production of crops, as well as the grazing of livestock.

These are just a few of the recent research on the global food system's impacts on the environment. The food system is a major contributor to climate change, water pollution, and land degradation. These impacts are likely to become more severe in the coming years, as the global population continues to grow.

Not too shabby, but a bit outdated (and they don’t provide any citations). Interesting how AI is set to become such a game-changer, and yet, as an expert, asking Bard to do a bit of research, it is pretty generic and lacks scientific nuance, which can be dangerous…Here are some even more recent papers out this week on food systems and climate from a flawed human perspective:

  • Ivanovich and colleagues at Columbia University (see a pattern?) published a paper in Nature showing that if we continue on our current food consumption patterns, this will add 1 °C to an already warm planet by 2100. Most of this warming is driven by what is called high methane foods (methane is another toxic greenhouse gas) like livestock, dairy, and rice (yes, we cannot blame it all on those cute cow creatures). If we made some of the changes mentioned in the IPCC report above, we could cut 55% of that warming.

  • Another paper, again published by Columbia University peeps (they are on a roll), called for more studies to better show how the food security of households and communities is impacted by climate-related shocks. They argue that most studies only examine food production and availability, not access or utilization.

  • And last, and this is self-promotional, a few of us put together an analysis trying to understand if the EAT-Lancet planetary health diet was adequate in nutrients (we didn’t look at environmental impacts or other health impacts, and we are not suggesting to do so). This particular analysis shows that the diet is inadequate in vitamin B12, calcium, iron, and zinc. The EAT-Lancet may not be happy with these results but this is what science is all about — debating on a level playing field, DISproving one’s hypotheses, and not being wed to ideologies. I am not sure right now that everyone at the so-called proverbial table looks at science similarly and instead holds fast to their worldviews, which worries me. But a lot is at “steak.” The EAT-Lancet Commission part has been downloaded over 6,000 times in 4 years. That is pretty insane. So to go against that, dissect it, calls to do it better next time around, or at least look carefully at the data, in which multiple people analyzing the dataset, is, well, what science and the pursuit of truth is all about. But putting one’s arm out to be potentially severed. Bottom line: This paper is about the trade-offs that are par for the course with a grand food systems transformation.

Showing tradeo-offs of policy bundles: Crona et al Nature 2023.

Blue foods: More and more, and this is long overdue, blue foods, aka seafood, aka aquatic foods, are getting more attention. The Blue Foods Assessment highlighted their importance from multiple angles - important contributors to a nutritious diet, some species’ environmental sustainability, their risk of climate threats, and contributors to livelihoods. Some fantastic articles have emerged recently, including a fantastic paper by Christina Hicks and colleagues examining the injustices associated with aquatic food systems. Another paper summarized the BFA around 4 policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints, and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. However, trade-offs always exist, just as above. The figure shows these — the question is, what trade-offs are we willing to live with? And last, on blue foods, the great Roz Naylor at Stanford published a policy landscape paper in Food Policy (thanks, Chris Barrett!) on aquaculture. I had the pleasure of working with her on this. Through a series of case studies, she presents a state-of-play on how aquaculture is playing out globally, and again, where those policy priorities elicit trade-offs that can be detrimental to the environment or nutrition. Check it out.



Understanding human water turnover in times of water scarcity

This writing was originally published in Cell Metabolism in their February issue.

Water covers 70% of the planet; however, only 3% is freshwater, which the global population depends on to drink, irrigate crops, and for our sanitation and hygiene. Water is central to almost all human activity and endeavors and, most importantly, the homeostasis of our bodily functions and health. We know that access to both adequate quantity and quality of water drives optimal health. Still, when in shortage or contaminated, it can cause deleterious effects on various health outcomes, some more known than others (1).

While there is substantial research understanding the health effects of insufficient water intake, there are measurement uncertainties in how much water people consume, retain, and excrete as well as a paucity of evidence on the influence of physical, metabolic, and environmental factors on water homeostasis in the human body. A recent study by Yamada et al. published in Science provides further insight into the determinants of water turnover (WT) or the water processed and used by the body (2). The largest study of its kind, they sampled 5,604 people living across 23 countries across diverse regions of the world ranging from 8 days to 96 years old. They examined whether age, body composition, physical activity, socioeconomic status, and geographical attributes of various regions impacted WT. They did this by having subjects consume 100 ml of water, of which 5% was deuterated. This isotope tracking allowed the investigators to measure WT in a highly accurate and precise way.

Predictably, WT was highest in neonates and decreased with age, positively correlated with free mass, total energy expenditure, and physical activity, and negatively correlated with percent body fat. Interestingly, where people live, and their livelihoods matter for WT as well. WT was higher in those living in hotter and more humid places and higher altitude areas. People with traditional livelihoods, such as hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, had higher WT than those working outside agriculture. Furthermore, people living in countries characterized as having a low human development index (HDI)—a comprehensive composite index that measures the different dimensions of human development, including standards of living, life expectancy, and education—had higher WT than those living in countries with middle- and high HDI, even after adjusting for physiological and environmental factors.

While some of these results may not be surprising regarding age and biology, they present clear warning signs of vulnerability when considering looming global scenarios, trends, and shocks to water security, with poor populations disproportionately suffering the most severe consequences (3). The world is already grappling with water scarcity—the availability of water depends on an intimate dance between a region's water demand and water supply. As it stands, 4 billion people live with severe water scarcity at least one month a year, with nearly half of those people living in China and India. Half a billion live with severe water scarcity all year round (4). Distressing still, 784 million people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water (5). The figure below shows how these numbers break down by the four major country income groups, and climate change will likely worsen this situation.

Figure 1: Number of people (millions) without access to safe drinking water, 2020

Legend: Each bar represents the surface (drinking water directly from a river, dam, lake, pond, stream, canal, or irrigation canal), limited (drinking water from an improved source for which collection time exceeds 30 minutes for a roundtrip including queuing) and unimproved (drinking water from an unprotected dug well or unprotected spring) sources of drinking water by country income classification. Source: World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, 2021

Climate change will have significant impacts on how much water is available as well as its quality. Already, water systems that provide freshwater to human populations are drying up and polluted from overuse and runoff, much of this coming from agriculture and other anthropogenic forces (6). Water ecosystems around the world will also continue to be strained and stressed. For example, since 1900, approximately 68% of wetlands have been lost, which are essential ecosystems that purify drinking water systems, among many other functions (7). In addition, extreme weather events related to climate change, such as changes to precipitation and severe drought, as well as the melting of glacier ice, is and will continue to impact water resources. There will also be a decline in the quality of water sources due to anthropogenic and natural factors, along with an increased demand for water due to higher temperatures and evaporation rates. As a result, water insecurity under "business as usual" climate scenarios will worsen (8).

Human demand for water worldwide has increased six-fold over the past century and continues to rise at around 1% per year due to the growing population and global economy (9). At the current consumption rate, by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may face water shortages (10). What will be the consequences for those vulnerable populations living in countries of low HDI given their increased demand for water? Even a slight imbalance in the delicate homeostasis of WT could put these populations at disproportionate risk for various health disparities, along with constraints on access to improved water safety and quality.

We are just beginning to understand the importance of how water is cycled through the body and how to measure it. Yamada and colleagues shed further light on the factors influencing how water is used and excreted in the body. One gap they highlight is the inability to measure the influence of water coming from food on WT. For those who work in food security, it will be necessary to understand how the quality and diversity of diets contribute to and potentially further protect water homeostasis in distinct biological, sociodemographic, and geographical contexts. Understanding this relationship could spur joint policy action among communities concerned with food and water security. With climate disruption continuing to threaten the quantity and quality of food and water sources, scientific and geopolitical collaboration has never been more urgent.  

References

1.     Popkin, B.M., D’Anci, K.E., and Rosenberg, I.H. (2010). Water, hydration, and health. Nutr. Rev. 68, 439–458.

2.     Yamada, Y., Zhang, X., Henderson, M.E.T., Sagayama, H., Pontzer, H., Watanabe, D., Yoshida, T., Kimura, M., Ainslie, P.N., Andersen, L.F., et al. (2022). Variation in human water turnover associated with environmental and lifestyle factors. Science 378, 909–915.

3.     Dell’Angelo, J., Rulli, M.C., and D’Odorico, P. (2018). The global water grabbing syndrome. Ecol. Econ. 143, 276–285.

4.     Mekonnen, M.M., and Hoekstra, A.Y. (2016). Four billion people facing severe water scarcity. Sci. Adv. 2, e1500323.

5.     World Health Organization and UNICEF (2021). World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. https://washdata.org/data/household#!/dashboard/new.

6.     van Vliet, M.T.H., Flörke, M., and Wada, Y. (2017). Quality matters for water scarcity. Nat. Geosci. 10, 800–802.

7.     Davidson, N.C. (2014). How much wetland has the world lost? Long-term and recent trends in global wetland area. Mar. Freshw. Res. 65, 934.

8.     IPCC (2022). Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press).

9.     Water, U.A.U.N. (2020). United Nations World Water Development Report 2020: water and climate change (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

10.   World Wildlife Fund. (2023). Water Scarcity https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/water-scarcity#:~:text=Billions%20of%20People%20Lack%20Water&text=By%202025%2C%20two%2Dthirds%20of%20the%20world's%20population%20may%20be,and%20economic%20decline%20may%20occur.


Food Bytes: January 2023 edition

Food Bytes is a monthly blog post of “nibbles” on all things climate, food, nutrition science, policy, and culture.

A little warm-up

Are you doing dry, damp, or wet January? Me, semi-dry…I have a good excuse, though. My lovely partner and I had to celebrate with a bottle of prosecco because I have accepted a full professorship at Columbia University’s new climate school, where I will lead their Food for Humanity initiative. I am sad to leave Johns Hopkins, but alas, change is good. I start in June, so get ready Gotham…

I also quit Twitter after 12 years. Felt good. I should have done it years ago…No toxicity! More time! Less self-promotion!

Let’s get the political stuff out of the way…

Is globalization over? The elite will again meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for some strained global discourse. When I say elite, gathering of the world’s 0.001 percent. Every year one asks if Davos has relevance or are these elitists more and more out of touch with what is truly happening in countries and communities. This NYT article on how Davos will confront the new world order says it all:

“The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, finds itself navigating troubled waters. Long the affluent symbol of a globalizing world where the assumption was that more trade would bring more freedom, it now confronts international fracture, ascendant nationalism and growing protectionism under the shadow of war in Europe and sharp tensions between the United States and China.”

I am sure climate change and food security will be on the agenda, but again much of it will be talking, among the elite few, with little action. As it stands, with the global food security crisis, rich countries have fallen short in providing much-needed assistance with increasing risk of hunger and, for some countries, such as Somalia, starvation. Sci Dev wrote an important piece on global starvation looming and rising food prices (see graph below. It deserves attention.

As the world tenses, doing nothing is not good enough, and flying to Davos in your private jet pontificating about poverty is getting tiresome.

If Davos doesn’t get you depressed enough, take a gander at the World Economic Forum’s global risk report. One word: polycrises.

Let’s confront the scary stuff…

California’s “atmospheric rivers”—these doom terms, I tell ya — yield all kinds of chaos for the Californians. The damage due to these intense storms and flooding is estimated to cost the state 30 billion. It is ironic, though, that droughts are a major issue and all roads point to these torrential storms as not helping, but perhaps they will contribute to the necessary snowpack in the long term. What hasn’t been discussed much in relation to storms is the potential damage to crops. California is a massive horticulture producer in this country, growing nearly half of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables in the United States. California’s agriculture also matters to the world because its products are exported to approximately 200 countries. Why is this such as issue? This is why:

“The rains are critical in breaking the worst drought in the US southwest in 1,200 years. The dryness has hurt crops across California’s Central Valley, one of the world’s largest agriculture economies, put large cities under stress, threatened water supplies for many smaller communities, and contributed to some of the largest and deadliest wildfires in state history. Dwindling flow in the Colorado River bordering California has also put hydroelectric supplies in danger.”

There is some hope, though. According to Civil Eats, farms that practice regenerative agriculture seem to weather the storms through innovation.

Let’s give a shout-out to great science…

The AI DALL-E’s rendering of when I asked for “her?” to draw an abstract painting of the Mediterranean diet.

  • Some colleagues at GAIN and Cornell just published this fantastic review on how animal-source foods—meat, fish, eggs, and dairy—can play an important role globally in ensuring healthy and sustainable diets.

  • Another paper by Amanda Woods and colleagues makes the case for resilience in food systems management and governance.

  • Remember that pesky EAT-Lancet Commission report that came out with a planetary diet (very similar to a Mediterranean diet, in my opinion…so what’s the big deal)? Yah, I am guilty of having been a commissioner. Since its publication in 2019, it has been cited about 6,000 times (no joke), and much science has followed. Take this article showing that 86 nations representing 51% of the global population can secure a nationally sourced EAT-Lancet diet from a land-availability perspective. That leaves 3.7 billion living in countries without enough land to source a planetary health diet. I guess trade is important after all!

  • Loved this Nature piece on the importance of indigenous knowledge for food security. This line. YES. “I am under no illusion about what it will take to achieve true collaboration at scale — both at the individual and systemic level. Yet in my interactions with Indigenous people and local communities, people’s generosity and willingness to work collaboratively has impressed me again and again.”

  • A modeling study published in the Global Food Security Journal from a multi-country collaboration examined the impact of the Ukraine-Russia war on food security. Their model show that food trade would decrease by 60%, wheat prices will increase 50%, and severe food insecurity would increase 30% in 2023. Dire.

  • A study in the Lancet Planetary Health examined 83 Food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) for their inclusion of environmental sustainability. Of the 83 they examined, only 37 mention ES and of those, none really emphasize why it is important, and how diets can be made to be more sustainable. My question is, who cares about FBDG? Does anyone follow them?? Yes, I get it, they inform public procurement, but they don’t really help individuals with dietary guidance. If you want a snarky take on the United States guideline, listen to this Maintenance Phase podcast (hands down the best podcast on poking holes in nutrition and dietary science).

Still baking, after all these years…

I am still baking, and it has become a relaxing ritual. This weekend? A castelvetrano olive, rosemary, whole wheat sourdough. My prettiest loaf yet! I followed this recipe more or less.

A new year's resolution for the planet

I woke just as the sun rose on the second day of 2023, reflecting, as one does, on what I accomplished over the last year, why it matters, and how I should strive to do things differently in the new year. January always brings about a time for reflection, renewal, and rebirth. For me, the promises I make to myself in the hopeful light of the turning of the clock last only a few weeks, and then I end up reverting toward the same comfortable, survival-mode routine. Maybe a few things change here and there. I tinker around the edges. But nothing spectacularly transformative. And maybe, just maybe, that is okay. This is who I am. These are my habits. My flaws. My warts. My joys. My life. Call it my age, but I guess I am a little less willing to set myself up for failure. Or maybe, I am just letting go.

I say all this to you not as a person who is defeated and cynical but as a person who is hoping for the best but expecting the worst in 2023. I am not an optimist nor a pessimist. I am a realist. I am a “who is going to wash the glass?” This morning, I re-read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, report on the physical science basis of climate change. This report lays down the hard science of climate change, the repercussions of that change, and future projections under different scenarios of zero to significant action toward mitigation. It is, frankly, incredibly stark. Many of us who work on climate change issues are told to be more positive and report on and present the good news, the silver linings. Of course, not all is doom and gloom, but it comes close. Unlike me, who tinkers on the edges each year trying to meet my new year's resolutions and goals, policymakers and industry players involved in fossil fuels, agriculture, and infrastructure, need to make massive resolutions that are transformative, and they need to stick to them.

This graph below really says it all. It shows the different shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), from sustainable to fossil fuel-dependent. Clearly, the world is not moving towards the optimal SSP 1.9. We are more likely hovering toward the SSP 2-4.5 pathway - the middle of the road. The graph shows that if we commit to this SSP, the world will continue to generate greenhouse gases by 2050, with a final tapering off after 2070. By then, the damage will be done - wreaking havoc on human, animal, and plant populations that depend on a more stable planet. Extreme weather events will come with more frequency and devastation. We will see much upheaval, migration, and inequities.

We are running out of time regarding climate change, and the chance to “reset” year in and year out is shrinking. So let’s raise a glass to bold and sticky resolutions that mitigate climate change and ensure that the most vulnerable and disadvantaged have the support to adapt. Let’s make 2023 about the planet.

Source: IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. doi:10.1017/9781009157896.001. 

Global food system transitions in the last 50 years: what have we learned so far?

We recently published a paper on food system transitions in Nature Food.

Food systems across the world have undergone tremendous changes in the last 50 years, shifting from more rural-based to industrialized and consolidated systems, resulting in both positive and negative impacts across various outcomes, including diets, nutrition and health, environmental sustainability, and livelihoods. In this paper, a food systems typology was used to examine how food systems transitioned historically. Food systems have enabled enough food to be grown to keep pace with the rapidly increasing population while reducing devastating famines that caused hundreds of millions of deaths, but with that great acceleration has come trade-offs and new challenges, particularly with climate change, ecosystem resilience, and deepening issues of inequity, which hamper progress to ensure all people are well-nourished.

This typology has five categories: (1) Rural and traditional, (2) Informal and expanding, (3) Emerging and diversifying, (4) Modernizing and formalizing, and (5) Industrial and consolidated. Categorization is based on the agricultural value-added per worker, dietary change as reflected by the share of dietary energy from staples grains and cereals, urbanization, and supermarket density, which are all closely related to economic growth.  The food system typology covers 155 countries and 97% of the world’s population, with 30-32 countries in each category, as illustrated in the figure below.

Source: Marshall, Q., Fanzo, J., Barrett, C.B., Jones, A.D., Herforth, A. and McLaren, R., 2021. Building a global food systems typology: a new tool for reducing complexity in food systems analysis. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, p.432.

Our analysis reveals that although the affordability of a recommended diet has improved over time, current food systems of all types are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all.  Six ‘outlier’ country case studies show broad trends, trade-offs, and deviations: Tajikistan, Egypt, Albania, Ecuador, Bolivia, and the United States of America.

Key Findings

Source: Ambikapathi et al. 2022 Nature Food

1.  Recommended diets have become more affordable as food systems have transitioned from rural to industrialized, although access depends on poverty levels which vary within food system types. The figure on the right shows how dramatic the difference is in who can afford a healthy diet.

2.  Increasing diet affordability is a function of multiple forces related to overall structural and rural transformation and food system transition. The process of transition determines who within countries can access an affordable diet.

3.  While food affordability is high, food system objectives to minimize environmental and climate change consequences and to improve nutrition and health outcomes are not being adequately met. Check out the figure to the right that shows the proportion of GHG emissions from each of the eight food system supply chain stages (land-use change, production, processing, packaging, transport, retail, consumption, end of life) across the five food system typologies. In general terms, land-use change and production practices constitute the primary sources of GHG emissions of all categories. However, as food systems transition from rural to industrialized, the share of these two main sources of emissions changes.

4. The reality of current food system transitions across the typology is far from a sustainable food system transformation. Such a transformation towards sustainable food systems will require addressing these challenges directly and setting a global agenda with equity, nutrition, and the environment at its core. In many cases, this agenda will challenge historical trends and processes that have led us to where we are today.  

5. The future will not look like the past and indeed cannot look like the past if we are to achieve sustainable food system transformation. Latecomers to the process of structural transformation face a very different world and a much more challenging economic context. The very process of food system transitions incurred by countries further along with structural transformation and the negative environmental and nutritional outcomes they engendered has changed the parameters of success for future transitions. This, coupled with variation in performance across countries within the five categories of the typology, suggests that we will see unique and heterogeneous patterns of food systems transition.

Implications

1.     Effective policies include reliable and well-targeted safety nets, school feeding programs, equitable distribution of land with appropriate environmental management and tenure policies and creating employment that provides increasing incomes relative to food prices to achieve affordable, nutritious diets.

2.     Food system transformation towards sustainable food systems will require setting a global agenda with equity, nutrition, and the environment at its core.

3. There are clear future research needs. More in-depth country-level case studies and high-quality sub-national data are needed to identify a range of effective solutions and the political economy tensions that hinder sustainable food system transformation.

Food Bytes: October 2022 Edition

Food Bytes is a monthly blog post of “nibbles” of information on all things climate, food, and nutrition science, policy, and culture.

It’s been a long while since I posted a Food Bytes edition, and so much has happened in the food space in the past year. First, a UN Food Systems Summit happened, but I remain quite unclear on what was achieved or what will come of the year-long work leading up to the event. Second, a devastating conflict between two breadbasket countries trudges on, putting food security concerns back on the geopolitical agenda. Third, extreme weather events, many related to climate change, unrelentingly warn us that our ability to feed a world of 8 billion (yikes) is precarious and precious. But science is there to nudge us, generating new knowledge on why we and every other species are here, what accelerates us, what destroys us, and where we are heading. Charles Mann wrote in The Wizard and the Prophet (a stellar book about William Vogt and Norman Borlaug’s discordant visions to feed the world):

Another thing this book is not: a blueprint for tomorrow. The Wizard and the Prophet presents no plan, argues for no specific course of action. Part of this aversion reflects the opinion of the author: in our Internet era, there are entirely too many pundits shouting out advice. I believe I stand on firmer ground when I try to describe what I see around me than when I try to tell people what to do.

I resonate with these sentiments. Even though science is plagued by warts, hiccups, and flaws, catalyzing evidence and data to help describe the world matters because it helps us understand nature, people, and the planet. With that background in mind, this month’s Food Bytes is all about highlighting the science community’s observations and uncertainties of a changing world and what it means for food systems and climate change. I purposely do not highlight the work of my team and collaborators, but if you are curious about when we do, you can look here.

Source: McKay et al. SCIENCE 9 Sep 2022 Vol 377, Issue 661 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7950

Let’s get the dark stuff out of the way. A paper by David Armstrong McKay and colleagues updated data showing that holding at 1.5°C will trigger multiple climate tipping points. What are these tipping points? Things like ice sheet “collapses,” forest “diebacks,” and permafrost “abrupt thaws” (see the figure to the right). These terms are downright scary but very plausible under different modeling scenarios. Okay, onto more uplifting news — KIDDING! Another study has shown that over the last 40 years, the Arctic has warmed four times faster than the rest of the world, also known as Arctic amplification. These are massive global shifts that will further warm the planet, creating all kinds of chaos. What does it mean for us wee creatures living in our humble abodes? Well, the news is not totally uplifting on that front either. We are and will be deeply impacted by climate — and no one is immune. Research by Sylvia Blom and colleagues showed that repeated, extreme heat shocks impact early child nutrition — both chronic and acute malnutrition. They show that in 5 West African countries, a 2 °C rise in temperature will increase the prevalence of stunting by 7%. As the two latest 2022 Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change Reports on adaptation and mitigation, also known as the IPCC, argue, we still have time to act, although when you read it, you may want to have a nice glass of scotch in hand. While the window remains open, it is closing, and fast. We need to make massive changes to the way we live, much of that involving our use of resources. A recent Nature Sustainability paper showed that no country meets basic needs—such as nutrition, sanitation, and access to electricity—for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. To meet needs, we need to use resources somewhere between 2-6 times more to meet everyone’s needs. Gulp. Just take a look at the difference between the United States (a) and Sri Lanka (b) in the figure below. Blue wedges show social performance relative to the social threshold (blue circle), whereas green wedges show resource use relative to the biophysical boundary (green circle). The blue wedges start at the center of the plot (which represents the worst score achieved by any country), whereas the green wedges start at the outer edge of the blue circle (which represents zero resource use). Wedges with a dashed edge extend beyond the chart area. Ideally, a country would have blue wedges that reach the social threshold and green wedges within the biophysical boundary. Look at the inequities comparing the two countries!

Source: O’Neill, D.W., Fanning, A.L., Lamb, W.F. et al. A good life for all within planetary boundaries. Nat Sustain 1, 88–95 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0021-4

The research and science in understanding the impacts of climate change on food systems and vice versa are growing exponentially. It is hard to keep up with the literature and weed out the noise. One area that deserves more attention is the impact of food trade on global greenhouse gas emissions and the environment—particularly land-use change—a significant source of emissions coming from food and agriculture. A study showed that 27% of land-use emissions and 22% of agricultural land are related to international trade (2004-2017)—food products consumed in a different place from where they were produced. The largest land-use emission transfers come from Indonesia and Brazil to China, the U.S., and Europe. A PLoS paper examining the future of trade shows that if we keep managing and governing global trade as is, food systems will be misaligned with dietary health and sustainability outcomes.

Perhaps one solution is through changing agriculture subsidy policies. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published their annual SOFI report and highlighted the need to transform agriculture subsidy programs around the world towards those that generate and produce healthier food products. Marco Springmann at Oxford modeled the impacts of subsidy policies that focused on nutritious foods and found multiple benefits across both environment and health. I am really uncertain about the political appetite to change subsidies. Talk about vested interests… Speaking of priorities, Ben Davies and colleagues argue that making big transformative policy changes across food systems is wonderful, but don’t do it “on the backs of the rural poor.” Although there are 2.7 billion people engaged in small-scale food production and 1.1 billion people concomitantly living in extreme poverty while working in agriculture, they are often ignored in the “transformation” story.

Affordability of a healthy diet grouped by five different food system typologies, showing transition of food systems. Source: Ambikapathi, et al Nat Food 3, 764–779 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00588-7

Positive transformation of food systems is not easy as history suggests. As Ramya Ambikipathi shows in a recent Nature Food paper, food systems have shifted from predominantly rural to industrialized and consolidated systems. Historically, incomes have risen faster than food prices as countries have industrialized, enabling a simultaneous increase in the supply and affordability of many nutritious foods. Evolving rural economies, urbanization, and changes in food value chains have accompanied these transitions, leading to changes in land distribution, a smaller share of agri-food system workers in the economy, and changes in diets. While the affordability of a recommended healthy diet has improved over time, food systems overall are falling short of delivering optimal nutrition and health outcomes, environmental sustainability, and inclusion and equity for all. Another fantastic paper by Jeff Waage and colleagues in Lancet Planetary Health shows the complex and risky relationship between agriculture and infectious disease, particularly in low-income and middle-income countries that are undergoing rapid food system transitions. They remind us that lessons can be drawn from COVID-19 and the rise of zoonotic spillover events within food systems should be prioritized (and minimized) on the political agenda.

Ensuring that everybody gets access to and consumes a healthy diet will remain a global challenge. The metrics, indicators, and data in understanding what people eat and why are improving. Just check out the Global Diet Quality Project, which collects dietary quality data in the adult population across countries worldwide using the Gallup poll and provides tools to monitor diet quality within countries. Wow. I hear rumblings of a global report coming out soon, so stay tuned. There has been a whole range of papers coming out on diet quality. Victoria Miller at Tufts University is on a roll. In one recent Nature Food paper, she examines diets across 185 countries from 1990 to 2018 using the Global Dietary Database (estimates and modeled). Their assessment shows that diet quality is modest at best but varies significantly depending on where you live, how old you are, and how much education you have. No surprises, but good to see more data emerging from this database. Miller and colleagues also published a more specific paper examining the consumption of animal-sourced foods worldwide showing that meat consumption is lower or higher than optimal intakes depending on the population. Another Miller paper published in JAMA examines the association of specific dietary factors with coronary heart disease, stroke, and diabetes using a systematic review. The table below summarizes the relative risks of the associations of nutrients with heart disease and diabetes events. Bottomline? Eat your fiber.

Source: Miller et al JAMA Netw Open. 2022;5(2):e2146705. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.46705

Another emerging area gaining significant traction with scientific consensus is ultra-processed foods (UPFs), a term loathed by the food industry and a handful of nutritionists. The majority of those working in nutrition epidemiology and public health largely agree that UPFs—food-like substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats that also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers—are detrimental to human health across a bolus of outcomes. Many people argue that these foods should be regulated, avoided, and minimized in the global food system. If you want to hear more about this ongoing debate, check out this BBC podcast and this online debate with some heavy hitters in the space like NIH’s Kevin Hall, Marion Nestle, and Mike Gibney. The next frontier for these foods is their environmental impact. While a handful of papers argue that these foods have a significant environmental and climate footprint, the evidence is scant, and much more needs to be done in this space.

The question is, are alt-meats in this category? The pace of science in this space is hard to keep up with as there is a lot coming out in the grey literature (see the IPES report and the OECD report as examples) along with peer-reviewed publications, but some of what is available often bends towards ideology and less science. Same with plastics. There is deep concern about microplastics showing up all over the place, including food, but the evidence and impact of these plastics on health outcomes need much more exploration. So while Mr. McGuire told Ben in The Graduate, that the future lay with one word, plastics, we may need to re-examine that advice in light of the fragility of our world.