Just eating healthier is not enough: studying the environmental impact of different diet scenarios for the Netherlands by Linear Programming

Eating healthier or vegetarian and vegan diets are suggested options to reduce the environmental impact of the current diet. In this paper we investigate different scenarios and assess the reduction of environmental impact after restoring the nutritional adequacy by replacements. We used Linear Programming to find solutions that are as close as possible to the current diet, first without any food groups’ constraints and later by imposing constraints on meat, fish, dairy and eggs. Finally, we use a similar technique to search for the closest diet that achieves the same environmental reduction as the most restricted option (no meat, fish, dairy or eggs), without restrictions on products. We show that it is possible to find less restrictive solutions than vegetarian or vegan diets that satisfy all nutritional requirements and have less environmental impact than the current one. Most important, these are closer to the current diet.