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Session: Novel Methodological Perspectives for Climate and Health Research (Oral 11)

(OR11-05-23) Measuring the Environmental Impacts of Diets Globally: The Intake4Earth App

Sunday, July 23, 2023
4:48 PM – 5:00 PM ET
Location:  Commonwealth

    Presenting Author(s)

  • Megan Deitchler, PhD (she/her/hers)

    Director, Intake - Center for Dietary Assessment
    Intake - Center for Dietary Assessment at FHI Solutions
    Washington, District of Columbia, United States

    Disclosure(s): No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.

    • Co-Author(s)

  • JP

    Joseph Poore

    University of Oxford

  • WB

    Winnie Bell, PhD, MPH (she/her/hers)

    Senior Technical Advisor
    Intake - Center for Dietary Assessment at FHI Solutions
    Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

  • JA

    Joanne Arsenault

    Intake - Center for Dietary Assessment at FHI Solutions

  • MV

    Marieke Vossenaar

    Intake – Center for Dietary Assessment, FHI Solutions

  • LP

    Luka Pauwelyn

    Intake - Center for Dietary Assessment at FHI Solutions

  • MM

    Mourad Moursi

    Intake – Center for Dietary Assessment, FHI Solutions

Disclosure(s):
Megan Deitchler, PhD: No relevant financial relationship(s) with ineligible companies to disclose.
Objectives: There is increasing demand to better understand the environmental impacts of diets as part of the broader contribution that food systems make to climate change and other environmental issues. Concurrently there is a need for smarter tools to assess population diets and measure diet quality. The Intake4Earth app is a technology-based data collection and measurement tool that has been designed to advance dietary data generation and reporting on issues related to both population and planetary health.

Methods: The Intake4Earth app provides a streamlined method for collecting quantitative 24-hour dietary recall survey data. The app comes with a global food database consisting of over 5,500 foods. Each food is linked with information on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, eutrophication potential, water use, and biodiversity loss to allow for deriving a set of environmental impact indicators. These underlying environmental impact data were derived from an earlier meta-analysis covering ~38,700 commercially viable farms across 119 countries and 40 food products, which together represent ~90% of global protein and energy consumption (Poore and Nemecek, 2018). We augmented this earlier analysis to expand the list of food products and provide country-level environmental impact data. The Intake4Earth app outputs diet-level impacts for each indicator and an overall environmental impact score for the diet using endpoint analysis following the LC-Impact method.

Results: The Intake4Earth app provides ready-to-use results to inform and advance efforts to improve dietary intake and planetary health. Results are provided for both the Global Diet Quality Score (GDQS) and a suite of metrics related to the environmental impacts of the diet. In addition, the Intake4Earth app tabulates a Sustainable Healthy Diet Metric, to report the percent of the population consuming a diet that is classified as healthy by the GDQS and which also scores low on the overall environmental impact score.

Conclusions: The Intake4Earth app has been developed to allow countries to use real-time data to easily assess and track the link between population-level dietary intake, diet quality, and planetary health, thereby enabling timely policies and programs that better address the health of both people and the planet.

Funding Sources: FHI Solutions and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation