| 英文摘要: | Health improvement and nutritional change could be an innovative route to emissions reduction. It makes sense to combine these previously divorced aims by measuring the carbon impacts of diet. It is easy to make people obese or give them diabetes. Feed them with plenty of fatty, salty, processed snacks and sugary drinks, and these conditions — commonplace in mature economies and rising in industrializing countries — may result. Farming and food emissions could increase at the same time, but this connection is currently obscured. However, a new carbon inventory of an entire food chain will help bridge these conventionally separated concerns. In a three-pronged investigation of health, diet and emissions, scientists funded by the Wellcome Trust (a charitable foundation that supports health research) are mapping out the climate impacts of India's eating habits. “This is about for the first time going into a poor country and saying: what are the emissions associated with your diets? It is about raising awareness within a massive country like India about its position and dietary footprint. It is about signalling that the transition from a traditional to a much more processed diet has poor consequences for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and health,” says project leader Alan Dangour, head of the Nutrition Group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The goal is to obtain a detailed picture of what people are eating throughout India and where the nutrition transition towards a more western high-fat, high-sugar diet has already led to an explosion of non-communicable diseases. The impact of each type of diet on people's health will be calculated, as well as how environmentally sustainable it is. The study is motivated by the trust's new strategic vision connecting environment, nutrition and health.
© BLEND IMAGES / ALAMY
Vendor with vegetables at a market in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India.
- 2014 Global Hunger Index: The Challenge of Hidden Hunger (IFPRI, 2014); http://go.nature.com/7DIWDA
- Rearde, T. & Minten, B. The Quiet Revolution in India's Food Supply Chains (IFPRI, 2011).
- Hijioka, Y. et al. (eds) in Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (eds Field, C. B. et al.) Ch. 24 (IPCC, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014).
- Global Status Report on Noncommunicable Diseases 2014 (World Health Organisation, 2014).
- Tilman, D. & Clark, M. Nature 515, 518–522 (2014).
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Elisabeth Jeffries is a journalist based in London, UK
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