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Diets can be consistent with planetary limits and health targets at the individual level

Nature Food volume 6, pages 466–477 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Progress towards eliminating hunger and promoting sustainable diets is lagging, with food systems damaging ecosystems and over 700 million people undernourished. Here we develop a linear programming model that identifies food combinations that satisfy both environmental and nutritional constraints. Using US-specific data, the model considers the environmental and nutritional characteristics of more than 2,500 food items consumed in the USA, optimizing diets based on the healthy life gained from the Health Nutritional Index. Aligned with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 °C target, various diets are found to offer up to 700 min of healthy life gained per week, while reducing climate impacts by a factor of seven. Vegan, vegetarian and flexitarian diets that limit meat consumption to 255 g per week (pork and poultry) best met environmental and nutritional constraints. Grains, legumes and nuts were the primary protein sources. These diets provide a range of specific options for consumers and actionable targets for policy recommendations.

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Fig. 1: Overall framework for the model set-up.
Fig. 2: Variability in diet performance for different indicators under Model 1.
Fig. 3: Variability in food group occurrences across diets.
Fig. 4: Food group contributions to health and environmental performance across diets.
Fig. 5: Relationship between carbon footprint and the HENI score across various diets.

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Data availability

All data used to define and calculate the nutritional requirements and the environmental limits were obtained from publicly available sources. The data used to calculate the environmental and nutritional factors of the food items are from ref. 27 and were further curated in the present study. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code used to develop the diet model is available via GitHub at https://github.com/cahege/Sustainable-diets-with-CPLEX-optimization. Modelling, analysis and visualization were carried out using the CPLEX solver (IBM Corporation) and Python.

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Acknowledgements

We thank K. Stylianou and V. Fulgoni for the data on environmental impacts and HENI scores for the food items used in this work. We received no specific funding for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Environmental and Resource Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Caroline H. Gebara, Etienne Berthet, Madeleine I. D. Vandenabeele, Olivier Jolliet & Alexis Laurent

  2. Centre for Absolute Sustainability, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Caroline H. Gebara, Etienne Berthet, Olivier Jolliet & Alexis Laurent

  3. MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Etienne Berthet

  4. Department of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Olivier Jolliet

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  1. Caroline H. Gebara
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Contributions

C.H.G., E.B., M.I.D.V. and A.L. designed the study. C.H.G. and M.I.D.V. carried out the literature reviews. E.B. developed designed the model set-up. O.J. provided food characteristics data. C.H.G. wrote the paper, made model improvements, produced the model results, curated data, performed all calculations and generated the figures. C.H.G., A.L. and O.J. conducted the analysis. All authors provided comments and approved the final submission.

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Correspondence to Caroline H. Gebara.

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Nature Food thanks Elisabeth Temme and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–13, Tables 1–10, Results and Methods.

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Supplementary Data 1

Data sheets supporting the methods and analysis of the results.

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Source Data Fig. 2

Data values for Fig. 2.

Source Data Fig. 3

Data values for Fig. 3.

Source Data Fig. 4

Data values for Fig. 4 in absolute values.

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Data values for Fig. 5.

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Gebara, C.H., Berthet, E., Vandenabeele, M.I.D. et al. Diets can be consistent with planetary limits and health targets at the individual level. Nat Food 6, 466–477 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-025-01133-y

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