Sustainable nutrition

Defining healthy and sustainable diets

The world’s food system faces a great balancing act. By 2050 it must feed around 10 billion people more sustainably without increasing the agricultural land area, using fewer natural resources, and emitting fewer greenhouse gases. In addition, diets should be healthier and meet human nutritional needs. Diets should prevent malnutrition and non-communicable diseases like obesity and cardiovascular disease.

The research area of sustainable nutrition attempts to provide answers on how to meet these challenges.

Healthy and sustainable diets

Businesses, governments, and civil society organizations are all looking for ways to make our food healthier and more sustainable. Blonk can help you identify the available options to achieve this. The answer ultimately lies in finding the right balance between food sustainability and health value. We use optimization techniques to help understand how to improve diets with minimum changes to eating habits.

Grasp the complete picture of healthy and sustainable diets


Defining healthy and sustainable food patterns is complex and should be based on a systematic investigation and sound data. We developed Optimeal, an optimization tool, which helps us understand the complete picture of healthy and sustainable nutrition. We use this tool in projects related to sustainable nutrition to calculate and optimize dietary scenarios which are both healthy and sustainable.

About Optimeal

Optimeal is an optimization tool that we use to solve dietary questions that involve sustainability and nutritional parameters. Optimeal lets us choose from multiple optimization algorithms based on linear or quadratic programming.

Data-driven optimization

Optimization requires data. Therefore, we developed several consistent datasets, consisting of a reference diet, nutritional constraints, nutritional properties for the products in the reference diet, and environmental properties (Life Cycle Assessment impacts) for the products in the reference diet.

Meeting nutritional and environmental constraints

Optimization aims to identify a diet that meets all nutritional and environmental constraints with as few changes to the current diet as possible. In this way, it takes the attainability of dietary interventions into account.

Sustainable nutrition:
the challenge for food and beverages producing companies

The main challenge for companies producing foods and beverages is to become 'future-proof' regarding health, environmental, and other sustainability concerns. Future-proof foods and beverages properly balance their nutritional value and environmental impact. This concept is called the Sustainability Nutrition Balance (SNB), which identifies whether a product or product group fits into a healthy and sustainable diet. The SNB-score can be determined in several steps, offering directions toward developing products that meet nutritional and sustainability requirements. With the help of Optimeal, we can assign SNB-scores to products or product portfolios.

Publication & reports on sustainable diets 

Together with companies, non-profits, research institutes and policymakers we explored the subject of sustainable diets, resulting in many reports and scientific publications.  

case study

“The Plate of Change” for healthy and sustainable diets in Central Europe

Blonk supported WWF Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) with diet modelling techniques and environmental data to develop win-win eating patterns that meet national nutritional requirements and reduce environmental footprints of diets for adults in Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary in 2030, while respecting cultural dietary habits. There is no one-fits-all solution to healthy and sustainable diets. In this research, we used diet optimization to gain insight into the dietary changes needed on a population level to achieve healthy and sustainable diets, mitigating any possible incompatibilities among the health, environmental, economic and cultural aspects of the diet.

Case Study related to sustainable diets

Eating for Net Zero: the role diets can play in the transition to lower environmental impact

Following the approach of the 2016 study WWF-UK commissioned Blonk in 2021-2022 again to model the Livewell diet and investigate how diet shift can enable a nature positive net-zero transition in the UK. The findings show that with a dietary change it is possible not to exceed the planetary boundary for GHG emission, whilst meeting the nutritional needs, being cultural acceptable and without increasing the price of the diet

Case Study related to sustainable diets

A dietary pattern that is healthy for both Belgians and the planet

WWF launched the European Eat4Change project to make young Europeans aware of ways to develop and adopt a healthier and more sustainable diet. Our current food system has a substantial environmental impact. With Eat4Change, WWF wants to make food production more sustainable, combat biodiversity loss and tackle the climate crisis. As part of this European project, on behalf of WWF Belgium, we analyzed which products fit into a sustainable and healthy diet for a family of four. We did so using our Optimeal software tool. The results also show that a sustainable and healthy diet is cheaper than the average Belgian's current dietary pattern.

Case Study related to sustainable diets

Future-proof food & beverage products

The main challenge for companies producing foods and beverages is to become 'future-proof' regarding health, environmental, and other sustainability concerns. Future-proof foods and beverages properly balance their nutritional value and environmental impact. This concept is called the Sustainability Nutrition Balance (SNB), which identifies whether a product or product group fits into a healthy and sustainable diet. The SNB-score can be determined in several steps, offering directions toward developing products that meet nutritional and sustainability requirements. Blonk Consultants developed the Optimeal optimization tool to grasp the complete picture of and study healthy and sustainable diets and assign SNB-scores to products or product portfolios.

Case Study related to sustainable diets

Healthy and sustainable diets for people and planet

Recently, the EAT-Lancet commission published a report on healthy and sustainable diets. In our studies we arrive at roughly the same conclusion. However, our research method was different, and actually more precise, with fewer limitations.

 

Case Study related to sustainable diets

Eating for 2 degrees - WWF UK and Sustainable Diets

In 2011 WWF UK published the first 'Livewell plate'. This was very successful in putting the topic of sustainable diets on the agenda of governments, food companies and health organisations, as well as demonstrating that it was possible to incorporate sustainability in dietary recommendations. Building on this success and the 'Paris Agreement' WWF UK decided to update the Livewell Plates. The new Livewell Plates demonstrate that by adopting a sustainable diet it is possible to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees.

Case Study related to sustainable diets

Menu for Tomorrow

For the Dutch environmental organisation Natuur & Milieu Blonk Consultants investigated what a healthy and sustainable diet would be for the Netherlands. The result is the Menu for Tomorrow, which provides a considerable reduction of greenhouse gases emissions and a smaller claim on scarce natural resources.

More information

Marcelo Tyszler
Head of Data Science and Data Innovation

Please get in touch with Marcelo if you would like to learn more about the opportunities we offer related to Sustainable Diets research.