Shifting away from animal-source calories in High-Income countries contrasts global Nutrition Transition patterns

Rapid dietary change to more plant-based diets and reduced animal products consumption is a powerful leverage for plummeting the environmental and climate impacts of food habits, key to achieve international agreements’ targets on climate and biodiversity.  Current eating patterns are shifting towards affluent diets high in sugar, fats, animal-source foods, highly processed products and empty calories. Nutritionally inadequate diets and reduced physical activity rates drive the incidence of overweight and non-communicable diseases, while increasing anthropogenic pressures on the environment.

While the optimal composition of  more sustainable and healthy diets has been extensively studied, the current stage of food systems from which their transformation should begin remains underexplored. In this study, we present a statistical analysis of dietary patterns from 1970 to 2021 of 189 countries and 17 essential foods. We examine the evolution of dietary energy intake along with gross domestic product, both at global and country scale, to identify transitions in countries' food demand and highlight heterogeneities from the global pattern.

Our analysis extends the concept of the nutrition transition from a country process to a globally emerging one, characterized by increasing animal-products caloric intake and declining dietary energy supplied by cereals and plant-based foods. Consistently across high-income countries, the prevalence of sugars in diets declines of 27% towards healthier intakes. Among these countries, we identify transitions in dietary energy supply from animal products to cereals and, less frequently, plant-based foods, providing novel evidence for a reconfiguration of diets towards a reduced reliance on animal-foods, potentially suggesting the onset of a new phase in the nutrition transition.