Dietary patterns on a global scale

We know that a country's food consumption changes in parallel to its degree of industrialization. Moreover, both food consumption and the state of economic developement determine how much green house gases are being emitted by a country. For instance, higher consumption of animal products in industrialized countries are linked to higher green house gas emissions.

In an attempt to elucidate global dietary patterns and their impact on agriculture related green house gas emissions, researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Department of Geo- and Environmental Sciences of the University of Potsdam impressively revealed transition pathways along the industrialization axis. Before they could do this, they characterized dietary patterns across the globe and came up with 16 dietary patterns:

Those are categorized according to their caloric value into low, moderate and high calorie diets with <2100 kcal per person per year, 2100-2400 kcal per person per year and >2800 kcal per person per year, respectively. The investigators found out that, among many interesting things, that certain food items were more frequently associated with higher degrees of industrialization as measured by the human developement index. Meaning, industrialized countries can be distinguished by their higher consumption of food in general, animal products, sweeteners, vegetable oils and vegetables.

Global dietary transition pathways. Arrows indicate frequency of  undergone transition from one type of diet to another based on food consumption data of  > 200 countries between the years 1961 and 2007.

Coming back to the transition data, a few important observations can be made. As civilizations "progress" (that is the forward direction of arrows), food consumption and energy intake increase. In parallel, dietary patterns shift towards animal products and vegetable oils with a concomitant decrease, for instance, in the consumption of starchy roots (with low calorie diets). Likewise, industrialization is associated with increasingly higher agricultural green house gas emissions (low emission= blue to green, high emission=yellow-orange-red). Transition pathways from the lower (blue) end of the spectrum to the higher (red) end of the spectrum are heavily favored (tickness of arrow) which means that societies most frequently move towards higher carbon dioxide emissions.

In summary, although high food and energy consumption are associated with higher measures of human developement which should be our aim for as many countries as possible; this shift comes with a considerable burden on our environment as can be seen by higher green house gas emission of industrialized nations. The consumption of animal products certainly contribute to this unfavorable shift.


Pradhan P, Reusser DE, Kropp JP (2013) Embodied Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Diets. PLoS ONE 8(5): e62228. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062228