Systematic Evaluation of Nutrition Indicators for Use within Food LCA Studies

Expressing the environmental impact of foods in relation to the nutritional quality is a promising approach in the search for methods integrating interdisciplinary sustainability perspectives. However, the lack of standardized methods regarding how to include nutrient metrics can lead to unharmonized results difficult to interpret. We evaluated nutrient density indexes by systematically assessing the role of methodological variables with the purpose of identifying the index able to rank foods with the highest coherence with the Swedish dietary guidelines. Among 45 variants of the nutrient density index NRF (Nutrient Rich Food), a Sweden-tailored NRF11.3 index, including 11 desirable nutrients and 3 undesirable nutrients, calculated per portion size or 100 kcal with the application of weighting, ranked foods most coherently with the guidelines. This index is suggested to be suitable as complementary functional unit (FU) in comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) studies across food categories. The results clarify implications of methodological choices when calculating nutrient density of foods and offer guidance to LCA researchers on which nutrition metric to use when integrating nutritional aspects in food LCA.

Supply chain integrated LCA approach to assess environmental impacts of food production in Finland

A process was started in the late 1990s to produce comprehensive environmental data on particular aspects of Finnish food production with the aim of analyzing the environmental impacts (at least climate change, acidification and eutrophication and some other impacts) of products and locating hot spots in production chains. A supply chain integrated life cycle assessment was carried out on fodder barley, hard cheese, oat flakes, potato flour, cream cheese potato gratin, beer, honey-marinated/sliced broiler fillet and greenhouse cucumber. Methodological improvements in assessing environmental impacts of food products were evaluated in relation to ISO14040 and 14044 standards. Methods improved, especially regarding quality of cultivation data and previously reported data from the literature, impact assessment and calculations for assessment of leaching from agriculture. As a generic conclusion on the share of contributions of the various phases of production chains to environmental impact: agriculture was the most important phase, especially in terms of eutrophication potential. Work in food LCA methodology has provided a sound base for future development in assessing environmental impacts of food products. In the future providing more and more environmental information on products for customers and consumers is setting new challenges for research.;