ABSTRACT
Recently published healthy eating guidelines in several countries – including the Nordic countries and France – have included sustainability criteria by, for example, advising individuals to eat less meat or consume local and seasonal produce. Incorporating evidence about the environmental impacts of eating into these guidelines is a difficult task. Research into the effects of diet on population health and into the environmental impacts of food production form two large bodies of research. Attempts to combine these separate bodies of knowledge into straightforward recommendations for the general public require complex judgements about how to reconcile sometimes contradictory and incomplete evidence. The development of new policy links between diet, environment and health thus provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the kinds of evidence mobilised in developing a novel form of ‘policy science’. It also prompts further questions about both the nature of dietary guidelines and their relationship to population-level changes in eating patterns. Guidelines are an everyday form of regulation, based in models of individual choice and control. Not only has research consistently shown them to be largely ineffective in changing behaviour, but their basis in individual choice is hard to reconcile with the collective aspects of sustainability criteria. This chapter is based on a literature review of conceptual understandings of dietary guidelines conducted between January 2016 and April 2016. It also draws on ongoing analysis of the growing body of reports (n = 39) and academic articles (n = 48) on sustainable diets published in English in the last ten years. It shows that sustainability research is becoming partially incorporated into nutrition research, but, when this occurs, the negative environmental impacts of diet are usually framed only in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. This risks overlooking other, less quantifiable environmental and social harms.
