Shops and Restaurants Make Way for Sustainable Diet

Changing the assortment of food and drink products on offer in shops, restaurants, and bars has the potential to improve diets, reduce inequalities and protect the environment, say researchers in a study published in The BMJ journal.

Researchers explain that suboptimal diets, particularly the consumption of energy-dense foods, meat, and alcohol are one of the largest contributors to premature death and preventable diseases worldwide. They also contribute to health inequalities and environmental harm.

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Along with measures such as higher taxes and marketing restrictions on unhealthy products. Availability interventions have the potential to contribute to population health and net-zero goals. But they remain largely overlooked by policymakers.

So, they set out to summarise the evidence supporting availability interventions in a form useful to policymakers.

They searched the scientific literature and identified nine real-world studies (including four new studies) showing consistent and often substantial effects of availability interventions on consumer selection of healthier or more sustainable options, with no evidence of adverse effects, including increasing health inequalities.

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For example, increasing the proportion of vegetarian meal options in a cafeteria from 25% to 50% decreased the selection of meat meals by almost eight percentage points (from 81% to 73%).

Similarly, increasing the proportion of lower energy food options available in cafeterias from 42% to 50% reduced the calories purchased per transaction by almost five percent compared with baseline (from 384 to 366 kcal).

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And early results from a study of online supermarket purchases suggest that decreasing the proportion of alcoholic drinks available from 75% to 50% and 25% increase the proportion of non-alcoholic beers and wines and soft drinks selected from 24% to 32% and 45% respectively.

Some uncertainties, such as whether these findings can be applied to low- and middle-income countries, and the impact of population preferences (social norms) on what we eat.

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Challenges that may contribute to the relative neglect of these interventions, such as not fitting with the dominant public discourse around personal responsibility for unhealthy behavior and resistance by businesses fearing loss of sales need to be taken care of.

Source-Medindia

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