A new dietary guideline balancing sustainability and nutrition for China’s rural and urban residents
Huijun Wu,
Graham K. MacDonald,
James N. Galloway,
Yong Geng,
Xin Liu,
Ling Zhang,
Songyan Jiang
Affiliations
Huijun Wu
School of Earth and Environment, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, China
Graham K. MacDonald
Department of Geography, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 0B9, Canada
James N. Galloway
Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
Yong Geng
School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China; China Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China; School of Economics and Management, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China; Corresponding author
Xin Liu
State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse, School of the Environment, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, P.R. China
Ling Zhang
College of Economics and Management, Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing 210037, China
Songyan Jiang
School of Management Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China
Summary: Diets have important but often complex implications for both environmental quality and nutrition. We establish a production-oriented life cycle model to quantify and compare the farm-to-gate environmental impacts and food nutritional qualities underlying rural and urban diets in China from 1980 to 2019, a period of rapid urbanization and socioeconomic changes. The environmental impacts of rural diets were generally higher than those of urban diets, but this gap reduced after 2000. Environmental and nutritional values varied considerably across the 31 Chinese provinces due to their different food intakes and dietary structures. Dietary changes coinciding with urbanization increased greenhouse gas emissions, eutrophication potential, and nutritional quality, but decreased energy consumption and acidification potential. Based on our results, we propose a new dietary guideline to mitigate environmental impacts and improve nutritional quality.
