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. 2022 Jul 29:9:974768.
doi: 10.3389/fnut.2022.974768. eCollection 2022.

True Cost Accounting of a healthy and sustainable diet in Italy

Bianca Minotti  1   2 , Marta Antonelli  3   4 , Katarzyna Dembska  3 , Davide Marino  1 , Gabriele Riccardi  5 , Marilena Vitale  5 , Ilaria Calabrese  5 , Francesca Recanati  3 , Annalisa Giosuè  5
Affiliations

True Cost Accounting of a healthy and sustainable diet in Italy

Bianca Minotti et al. Front Nutr. .

Abstract

It is widely upheld that global food systems are unsustainable. Sustainable diets are gaining prominence as key components to entangle global food system challenges, as well as to transition towards the pathway of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Hence, sustainable and healthy diets are at the core of much research with the aim to bring together nutritional adequacy, cultural acceptability, environmental sustainability, economic affordability, and shape future consumption patterns. This article contributes to advancing knowledge on sustainable diets by proposing a True Cost Accounting method to assess the cost and impact of the adoption of a more sustainable and healthier diet, using Italy as an illustration. The research analyses the complexity of a diet from an environmental, health, and socioeconomic point of view and defines a new assessment framework that can be replicated and adapted to other contexts. Results show that in Italy, the adoption of a sustainable and healthy diet has a 47% lower carbon footprint and 25% lower water footprint than the current diet, while impacting 13% less on the average income and food monthly expenditure. Also, the desirable diet has a 21% lower impact on the sanitary costs related to cardiovascular disease. This study corroborates that the consumption of the desirable diet would provide a total cost saving of 741 EUR per year per capita, if we consider its impact on the environment, health, and socio-economic costs.

Keywords: TCA; carbon footprint; healthy diets; sustainable diets; water footprint.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
TCA model (Source: Authors).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
CO2 emissions associated with the weekly consumption of foods in the desirable and the current Italian diet (Source: Authors).
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Water footprint associated with the weekly consumption of foods in the desirable and the current Italian diet (Source: Authors).
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Weekly cost of foods consumed in the desirable and in the current Italian diet.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Changes in the expenditure for the various foods according to the desirable diet compared to the current Italian diet.
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 6
Affordability index of the desirable and the current Italian diet in reference to the ISTAT monthly food expenditure (2020) (Source: Authors).
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 7
Multi-criteria comparison of the desirable and the current Italian diet based on the results of the study (Source: Authors). Figure 7 has been obtained by calculating the variance for the desirable and the current Italian diet from the average of the results for each variable. The values for each variable highlighted in the results have therefore been divided by the average (between the desirable and the current diet) and multiplied by 100 to obtain the variance showed.
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