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Adoption of region-specific diets in China can help achieve gains in health and environmental sustainability

Nature Food volume 5, pages 764–774 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

The vast heterogeneity in dietary practices across China has led to profound regional disparities in health and environment. To address this issue, we developed a region-specific reference diet (RRD) that is better aligned with Chinese culinary traditions, affordable, sparing of natural and environmental resources, and contributes to health. The adoption of the RRD has proven to be a viable solution to facilitate a rapid transition towards a healthy and environmentally sustainable diet across the country when compared to dietary guidelines from the World Health Organization, the EAT-Lancet Commission and the Chinese Nutrition Society. The RRD improved health in all regions and resulted in reductions of all five environmental impacts measured. Given China’s huge population and its major impact on global sustainability, the widespread adoption of the RRD would not only yield substantial health benefits domestically, but also contribute significantly to global food security and sustainability efforts.

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Fig. 1: Dietary health and environmental impacts across China.
Fig. 2: Illustration of the RRD.
Fig. 3: Nutrient adequacy of the RRD.
Fig. 4: Potential gains of the RRD.
Fig. 5: Feasibility of the RRD.

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Data availability

Datasets used in this study are all publicly available and are as follows: the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-results/), China Health and Nutrition Survey cohort (https://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china), FAOSTAT database (http://www.fao.org/faostat/#en/#dat), Carbon Emission Accounts and Datasets (https://www.ceads.net.cn/), the Second National Census of Pollution Sources in China from 2017 to 2020 (https://qikan.cqvip.com/Qikan/Article/Detail?id=7102867109), National Bureau of Statistics of China (https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/Statisticaldata/yearbook/) and Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/). The regional data on production, transportation, retail, and waste and loss are derived from published yearbooks, including the China Agriculture Yearbook and the National Bureau of Statistics of China (https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/Statisticaldata/yearbook/). The multi-indicator LCA database is extracted from a previous report34. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The R v.4.0.3 codes used to generate the results and figures reported in this study are available from the lead author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Distinguished Young Scholars of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Overseas, 21HAA01094), the Guangzhou Science and Technology Project (2024A04J6477) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Sun Yat-sen University (22hytd03).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Food, Nutrition, and Health, and Department of Statistics and Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Bingqi Ye & Ludi Liu

  2. Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Food, Nutrition, and Health, Department of Nutrition, School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China

    Qianling Xiong, Jialu Yang, Zhihao Huang, Jingyi Huang, Jialin He, Min Xia & Yan Liu

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Contributions

Y.L. and M.X. designed the study. B.Y., Q.X., J.Y. and J.H. prepared and analysed the data. B.Y., Z.H., J.H., L.L., M.X. and Y.L. drafted the manuscript and Y.L. revised the manuscript. All authors made substantial contributions to the intellectual content of the paper and approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Min Xia or Yan Liu.

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Nature Food thanks Fabrice DeClerck, Brent Loken and David Love for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Ye, B., Xiong, Q., Yang, J. et al. Adoption of region-specific diets in China can help achieve gains in health and environmental sustainability. Nat Food 5, 764–774 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-01038-2

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