Are global dietary recommendations meaningful?

Should we not ask why consumption patterns are so different than recommendations?

In the two previous posts I have discussed two research articles. The first one was about the costs of healthy food and the fact that only half the global population can't afford a healthy diet. The second was about how few countries (only Guyana actually) are self-sufficient in healthy food. The definitions of healthy food were slightly different in the two cases, but by and large they are similar. None of the articles discussed if the dietary recommendations used made sense.

In my previous article I showed that the actual consumption is quite different from the recommended consumption, in particular regarding the share of nuts, pulses, fruit and vegetables in the diet. Almost no people eat as much of those that is recommended. If almost no country and few people consume according to a certain recommended diet, could that not also be an indication of that the recommendation is a bit off the mark? Should we not ask why consumption patterns are so different than recommendations?

Why aren't they doing what they are told?

Fruit, nuts and vegetables are very expensive when measured in cost per energy or protein unit*. I am well aware of that the recommendations for fruit and vegetables are not based on them as a energy or protein source, but it seems quite hard-wired in humans to go for energy and protein in food, and if you are poor, that is even more the case. Most vegetables and some fruit are also bulky which means you need to eat a lot to reach the recommendations. Therefore, it is primarily wealthy women doing little manual work (and often being concerned over their weight) that eat a lot of vegetables. Hard-working people are rarely big consumers of vegetables, simply because you have to eat too much of them to get the energy you need. Perhaps there is also an expert bias in play here as nutritionist are mostly women doing little manual work; for example, 95 percent of the dietary nutritionists in the US are female.

For farmers, vegetable growing can be very profitable, but also very demanding. It comes with high risks in terms of challenges in production (pests, weather, water) and in very volatile markets; prices for perishable vegetables often vary a lot more than for other field crops, and it is rather common that farmer leave a crop unharvested as the marginal cost of harvesting is higher than the market price. The use of fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides, plastics, cooling etc. is very high. China produces half of the world’s vegetables. The production uses 1.7% of the global harvest area of crops but accounts for 7.8% of the chemical fertilizers and 6.6% of crop-related greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to one estimate. In general, the environmental credentials of vegetables is questionable. The high use of resources is also the reason for why vegetables are expensive. In addition, fruits and vegetables clearly stand out with high levels of pesticide residues all over the world, something that almost all dietary recommendations just skip over.

Vegetable production - the sea of plastic in Almeria, Spain, Photo: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While I am a great vegetable fan and being a vegetable grower I have a vested interest in them, I still think the public recommendations seem to be on the high side. It might be a better strategy to adjust the recommendations closer to the reality instead of insisting year after year that people should follow a diet they never will follow or can't afford. Perhaps, people should get advice for which vegetables give you most value for money (or effort if you are a smallholder). The consumption within the vegetable category is often not at all optimal from a nutritional perspective, but is mostly dominated by expensive and less nutritious vegetables such as tomatoes and cucumbers rather than carrots, onion and cabbages (in some countries they include potatoes in vegetables, but that is cheating, nutrition wise it belongs to the starchy crops).

For pulses (legumes) the story is different. While people eat more nuts, vegetables and fruit as income increases, the trend is the opposite with pulses. The main reason, from a consumer perspective, is that with increased wealth, protein is satisfied with fish and animal products while legumes are consumed in lower quantities in special dishes rather than being a staple food in combination with grain, the traditional use. The expansion of industrial chicken production has made chicken so cheap that it has squeezed pulses out of the market. A few years ago, I compared the cost of protein for dried beans and chicken in a Swedish supermarket and found that the protein in chicken was as cheap as the protein in dried beans (in addition, it also has higher protein quality)! Pulses are also not very well adapted to the fast cooking or eating that dominate the modern food system. Typically, processed products and convenience foods made of/with pulses are increasing and among dry pulses, lentils are on the rise as they are quicker to cook than beans or peas. Dried beans and peas are nowadays rare items in Swedish supermarkets shelves; most of the beans and peas sold are processed in numerous ways, including as pasta and crisps (now, don't take this as a defense of industrial chicken production or pre-cooked beans, I just relate how it is. I grow my own beans and will never buy industrial chicken). Even in a country such as India, with a very strong tradition of production and consumption of pulses, is the consumption well below the public recommendations and shrinking.

In the field, apart from soy beans, there has been very little seed breeding efforts in pulses compared to grains which means that under most conditions it is simply more profitable to grow, wheat, rice or maize than pulses. The huge global surplus of these, in particular maize and wheat, is fed into the chickens – which in turn compete with pulses on the plate. The availability and ubiquitous use of nitrogen fertilizers has reduced the comparative value of the nitrogen fixing ability of legumes. The move towards industrial commodity farming and industrial livestock production is therefore an important factor in the decreased production and consumption of pulses.

Going nuts

There are severe limitations in the agriculture system for increasing nut production. The current global production is 20 million tons, corresponding to 2,5 kg per capita per year or 7 grams per day – in shell. Nuts are expensive and most are consumed by rich people and produced by poor farmers (almonds in California are an exception) who can't afford to eat them. The Eat Lancet diet recommends 25 g of shelled nuts which is more than seven times the current global production (assuming that shelled nut yield is 50% of nut-in-shell). Considering that nuts are mostly produced in regions with severe water stress, it is doubtful that it is possible, or even desirable, to increase nut production to meet the Eat Lancet diet. Having said that, I have, despite climatic challenges, planted walnuts and hazelnuts in our farm (the hazelnuts are not doing well and the walnuts are on their climatic limit and grow slowly).

The dietary recommendations are also mostly including a high intake of vegetable oils. This is particular the case when they recommend low intake of dairy and meat. Historically, in most cultures, animals and fish were the main sources of fat and vegetable oils were rare apart from the olive oil belt around the Mediterranean and some tropical areas where palm oil or coconut oil were common. More than two thirds of the vegetable oil in the world come from oil palm or soybeans today. The production of vegetable oil crops is concentrated to a few countries and a lot of countries are now dependent on imports of vegetable oils. Many wealthy, health conscious consumers on both sides of the North Atlantic see olive oil as the oil of preference both from a health and environmental reason. But olive oil is really a minor and expensive vegetable oil with very limited possibilities of expansion. The environmental credentials of olive oil is also lost when production expands; today many olive plantations are very intensive orchards with no bio-diversity and a high use of fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. By and large, if you recommend vegetable oils in a global food context, palm oil is the alternative for most people, especially those that are poor.

In most dietary recommendations, consumption of starchy food, meat and dairy should be reduced. One can clearly point to a lot of environmental problems linked to the industrial production of these, so my objections are not based on that those in any sense are superior. In general, when it comes to environment, I believe the question is mostly about how something is produced rather than the crop or animal as such.

This also includes how things are processed. The categories of food used in the research I discussed in the two previous article, discuss food from a raw material (primary production) perspective, but in reality, most food, especially in richer countries, are consumed as processed or ultra-processed foods. I find it dubious to classify orange juice made from orange concentrate as fruit, a cracker as grain or whey protein bars as dairy.

Healthy food recommendations do not take production realities into consideration

Few, if any, dietary recommendations take the realities of production into account and even less the interaction between different parts of the food and agriculture system. Most vegetable oil has animal feed as an important co-product (when producing soy bean oil, you get 79% animal feed, when producing canola oil, 60% etc.). Also most wheat is consumed as white flour and the bran is mostly used as animal feed. Beef is a by-product of dairy production. The beef-to-milk ratio varies considerably is low in intensive systems and very high in extensive systems. Globally, more than half of the beef production originates in milk production which means that for one litre of milk, 60 grams of beef is produced. There are many other such linkages in the food system, which means that many recommended diets simply don't match the realities on the ground.

Dietary recommendation have a very lopsided consumption perspective. In general however, the underlying agroecological, technical and economic factors are determining most of the food production and consumption. Public recommendations or scientific scenarios for a healthy diet, a climate friendly diet or what not constantly fail to take these realities into account, and are therefore ineffectual. They are built upon the erroneous assumption that the food system is determined by consumer preferences. This also coincides with the neo-liberal perspective that in the market the consumers are in power. But that is just a myth, something that I expand upon in this article. If you want a brilliant version of this, you can watch this clip with Meryl Streep from The Devil Wears Prada (thanks for pointing me to this scene, Annika T!).

Even if the consumer is not in command, markets certainly are very important in shaping food consumption. Powerful market actors such a commodity traders, huge food industries and multiple retailers (supermarket chains) are choice architects. Even if global food chains, in theory, give consumers an enormous variety, the end result of the global food system is a diet dominated by a few staple crops and animals which are combined and recombined into branded products with prices many times higher than the primary products. My book Global Eating Disorder, discuss this in detail.

To sum up, I believe the recommendations for healthy food neglects the realities and limitations of the production system as well as of the market place. In addition, some of them are also based on flawed or weakly supported assumptions. This also applies to recommendations for “climate-friendly diets”. In my view we would do a lot better to discuss consumption starting on the ”land”, i.e. the soil, the farm and the climate. Now as always we are bound to consume what can be produced and it makes a lot more sense to primarily eat what can be locally produced rather than according to any scientifically determined diets (regardless of which criteria being used). A global diet is simply not feasible, and in the end also not desirable. This discussion also has some bearing on how we embed the food and agriculture system into the ecology, a question by which I ended the previous article. More on that in the next article.

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* An exception to this is the collection of wild mushrooms (mushrooms are technically not plants but are mostly included in the food category vegetables), fruits and berries which poor people often can collect for own consumption in forests. When collected for the market though, wild products are often expensive as there is a lot of work involved in the collection and the logistics to bring them to the market. Anna Lewenhaupt Tsing's book “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins” can give you a interesting perspective on that.