"Toward Sustainable Dietary Guidelines for Americans"
Abstract
Opportunities exist to shift eating patterns to simultaneously promote health, reduce pollution, and conserve natural resources. Nutrition policy is a key mechanism to establish these linkages. The Dietary Guidelines for Americansare foundational nutrition policy in the US, influencing federal spending, consumer education, and food industry decision-making. The most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2015-2020) were published without consideration of their environmental impacts, despite evidence-based recommendations by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee that incorporated sustainability. This presentation will summarize recently published research on the environmental impacts of the healthy eating patterns in the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and highlight next steps for research and evidence-based policy.
Bio
Nicole Tichenor Blackstone is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Agriculture, Food, and Environment at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Prior to joining the Friedman School faculty this summer, Nicole was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Sustainability Institute at the University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on developing and evaluating strategies to improve food system sustainability. Some of her recent projects include modeling the environmental impacts of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, quantifying the environmental and nutritional costs of food waste, and estimating regional self-reliance and environmental impacts of livestock in Northeastern US. Nicole earned her Ph.D. and M.S. from the Friedman School. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Kansas. Nicole also has experience in food policy spanning the local to national levels, through previous work with the Douglas County Food Policy Council (KS) andNational Family Farm Coalition.