1. Identification of nutritional and environmental hotspots
Identification of hotspots can be achieved by a contribution analysis, focusing on key environmental indicators, qualifying nutrients and disqualifying nutrients within national diets. The comprehensiveness of this analysis depends on the availability of data. Although this contribution analysis is meant as an initial exercise to create insight in what matters most, it requires detailed data on food consumption at the level of individual foods. These are available from sources like EFSA’s Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database or NHANES/WWEIA (USA). Each food in the survey needs to be linked to generic or company specific data on environmental impacts and food composition data. The latter is available from public sources like Ciqual (FR), McCance & Widdowson’s (UK), NEVO (NL) or USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference (USA). The main obstacle here is the availability of environmental data, since it is quite an investment to perform cradleto- grave Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) of a large number of foods and beverages covering all relevant environmental impacts. As a starting point the Carbon Footprint (CF) is suitable. LCA data is available on foods covering a large proportion of the diet [2,3].
A contribution analysis of qualifying and disqualifying nutrients can focus on national and international priorities. For macronutrients these are are very similar in all developed countries: energy, saturated fat, alcohol, sugar and fiber. Micronutrients of importance to public health differ between countries and sections of the population[4]. In the UK, a large proportion of the population (youths, adults, seniors) is at risk of magnesium, potassium, selenium and vitamin D deficiency, while in France iodine intake too is generally low.