The nutritional footprint - assessing environmental and health impacts of foodstuffs

The food sector accounts for huge environmental impacts caused by production, processing, final consumption and waste treatment in private households or in out of home catering settings. Further, the field of nutrition inextricably links environmental and health aspects to each other. Thus, the domain of nutrition has to be considered intensively if environmental aspects and health considerations should be further examined. By now a few scientific concepts address this topic and are available to relate the sustainability dimensions with each other, if it comes to nutrition and the food sector. One of these newly invented instruments will be introduced within this paper: the Nutritional Footprint. This approach is formed in detail by setting a data assortment of available environmental data (e.g. material footprint or carbon footprints within the life cycle) in relation to available nutrition data (e.g. salt content or calorie specifications). Recommendations (e.g. WHO recommendations or valid scientific recommendations) and sustainability assessment levels are estimated, to enable a comparison of environmental and health impacts of foodstuff. Therefore the instrument presents a way to match and communicate environmental and health impacts, using a selected amount of indicators, to stay transparent and clear. It is available and useful for companies to expand their internal data and their external communication performance. Two examplary dishes are estimated to illustrate the concept of the instrument.