Sustainable Nutrition - Combined health and environmental effects

With expertise in nutrition, food science and the environment, we help companies and other organizations to develop products, product portfolios, recipes, meals and entire dietary concepts that maintain both nutritionally and environmentally high performance. In this way, conditions are created for sustainable production and consumption of food.

The food we eat has a major impact on both our health and the environment. Both perspectives need to be considered, in order to achieve sustainable production and consumption of food.

Often the environmental impact of food is calculated per kilogram of food without taking into account its most important function, to provide us with nutrition. Within sustainable nutrition, we connect what we know today about nutrition and health with what we know about the environmental impact of different foods, to give a more comprehensive picture of how sustainable a food, a meal or a diet is.

Our offers

We offer nutritional and environmental assessments of products, product portfolios, recipes/meals and whole diets. Among other things, we offer guidance and implementation of so-called nutritional-LCA (n-LCA) where nutritional quality is integrated into traditional life cycle analysis of food.

More information on n-LCA >>

Based on the assessments, we provide guidance for the work ahead, regarding

product/recipe/meal
development strategic work
communication

For the nutritional assessment, we have experience with several different indicators, e.g. nutrient density index (e.g. Nutrient Rich Food, NRF) and labeling systems within the EU, such as the keyhole, nutritional and health claims and Nutri-Score.

For the environmental assessment, life cycle analysis is used, where the RISE climate database is an important aid. In 2021, RISE also initiated a project to develop a biodiversity database for food. We evaluate the usefulness of various indicators based on the customer's products and needs, with the possibility of customized variants.

We also offer e.g.

Knowledge compilations
Workshops
Fact-checking of reports and press releases
Collaboration opportunities in research projects

Our research

In order to best support other actors in the transition towards a more sustainable production and consumption of food, we conduct research in collaboration with both nutrition researchers and environmental scientists, at both Swedish and international universities.

A central focus of our research is to identify and develop methods to enable better analyzes of the combined health and environmental impact of food, meals and diets. In our research, we strive to develop indicators, which can be used to measure the nutritional and health performance of foods, in combination with environmental assessments. The goal is robust and validated nutrition indicators that are both practically applicable and reflect the health effects of food. Together with other sustainability indicators, it is hoped that these indicators will provide guidance and facilitate the transition towards more sustainable foods and diets

Another exciting area of research in sustainable nutrition is combined analysis of the health and environmental impact of diets based on data from epidemiological studies. By analyzing both health outcomes and the environmental impact of different diets based on dietary data from large population groups, we can better understand which food choices provide the best effect for both health and the environment. This type of research gives us important new knowledge about what sustainable eating habits can look like in practice, based on what people actually eat.