Strategies to achieve healthy and sustainable diets at scale: developing a novel approach to predicting changes in dietary-, health- and environmental outcomes

Substantial shifts in contemporary diets are needed to halt the growing burden of chronic diseases and the rapidly accelerating climate crisis.

Achieving this will require strong action and use of policy instruments that can aid consumers in making the right dietary choices.

Real-life evidence on how to change dietary behaviours within complex food systems at scale demands resources and research that might not be realistic to acquire or realise.

Thus, this project aims to use a novel approach to predict the dietary, health and environmental effects of broad-scale strategies designed to transform dietary behaviours among consumers.

Scenarios will be simulated using agent-based models to evaluate the following interventions: Increased price of meat; Reduced price of plant-based foods; and Social marketing campaigns.

The ABMs will comprise agents (i.e. consumers) with empircially derived sociodemographic attributes and perceptions/concerns about food and the environment.

In these models, interventions (coupled with attributes and agent-agent interactions) alter consumption in a probabilistic way, leading to shifts in diet-related non-communicable disease risk and environmental impacts. Environmental and health impacts will be quantified by using existent data, life tables and relative risk estimates.

The findings of this project could inform decision-makers in their development and priority setting of different measures to achieve healthy and sustainable dietary habits at scale.