Broad approach to tackling malnutrition

The project takes a holistic approach. This means that it includes a wide range of topics, including epidemiology, geriatrics, health, physical activity, microbiomics, consumer behaviour and sensory and computer sciences. Blonk Consultants is responsible for sustainability. Ultimately, the project should lead to sustainable and healthy diets for older people and strategies for physical activity to prevent malnutrition and promote healthy ageing.

Sustainability and healthy diets

Within the work package, our efforts are focused on developing sustainable, feasible and (cost) effective diets and strategies for physical activity. A first step in determining the sustainability of diets is to collect environmental data on a selection of European foods in Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs). The environmental impact (carbon footprint, land use and fossil energy consumption) of 93 generic foods selected from the EFSA Comprehensive European Food Consumption Database has been calculated over the entire life cycle, from cultivation to packaging, consumption and final disposal. The criterion for selecting the foods was their contribution to the impact of a European diet for the elderly.

Dataset in Optimeal®

The next step will be to add this dataset to Optimeal® to enable us to make analyses of healthy sustainable diets. Optimeal® is one of the modern technological solutions that can help older people as well as manufacturers of products for the elderly to make healthy choices.