Healthy and Sustainable Diets in Bangladesh
An ideal food system is envisioned to provide healthy diets for people and be sustainable for the environment. Such a food system is required to deliver on these goals even as diets are increasingly and disproportionately comprised of high-fat and/...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099250009012254667/IDU06764ba7f056d80448e0a10409985341922cd http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37955 |
| Summary: | An ideal food system is envisioned to
provide healthy diets for people and be sustainable for the
environment. Such a food system is required to deliver on
these goals even as diets are increasingly and
disproportionately comprised of high-fat and/or high-sugar
foods vis-à-vis nutritious diets. The ideal “planetary
health diet,” as defined in the EAT Lancet report for
several countries, presents trade-offs when contextualized
at the local level. Using Bangladesh as the case study, this
paper examined the change in diets (between 2000 and 2016)
and their greenhouse gas emissions over time and compared
the nutritional value and environmental impact to two
modeled diets: national food-based dietary guidelines and
the planetary health diet/EAT Lancet diet. The analysis
finds that despite a change of the diet toward the
recommended diet, significant gaps remain from a nutritional
perspective. Moreover, meeting the dietary guidelines would
increase greenhouse gas emissions by at least 10 percent.
Compared to the food-based dietary guidelines, the EAT
Lancet diet requires dietary patterns to change even more
significantly and would increase greenhouse gas emissions by
23 percent. The policy implications and options from the
production and demand sides are complex and require
assessing multiple trade-offs. |
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