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Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet

At present, as we face climate change and natural resource scarcity, one of the major challenges linking humans and the environment is to ensure sufficient, nutritious, safe, and affordable food for a rapidly growing world population. In a nutshell, “feed the world without destroying it”. The water...

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Autor principal: Bordoni, Alessandra
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10181431/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37432353
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu15092204
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author Bordoni, Alessandra
author_facet Bordoni, Alessandra
author_sort Bordoni, Alessandra
collection PubMed
description At present, as we face climate change and natural resource scarcity, one of the major challenges linking humans and the environment is to ensure sufficient, nutritious, safe, and affordable food for a rapidly growing world population. In a nutshell, “feed the world without destroying it”. The water footprint (WF), i.e., the withdrawals of fresh water necessary to produce one kilogram of food product, is one of the key indicators of the environmental impact of diets. In this work, the WF of the food patterns suggested by the Italian Food Based Dietary Guidelines, considered a model of the Mediterranean Diet, was evaluated for the first time. The data reported here clearly demonstrate that the suggested Italian dietary patterns have a low WF, the reduction of which by replacing animal foods with plant foods is limited because the suggested consumption of meat is already low. Consumer choice in the consumption of specific products within a food group could further reduce the WF of the diet, underlining the need to provide correct information not only to consumers but also to farmers and producers to encourage them to make water-saving choices.
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spelling pubmed-101814312023-05-13 Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet Bordoni, Alessandra Nutrients Article At present, as we face climate change and natural resource scarcity, one of the major challenges linking humans and the environment is to ensure sufficient, nutritious, safe, and affordable food for a rapidly growing world population. In a nutshell, “feed the world without destroying it”. The water footprint (WF), i.e., the withdrawals of fresh water necessary to produce one kilogram of food product, is one of the key indicators of the environmental impact of diets. In this work, the WF of the food patterns suggested by the Italian Food Based Dietary Guidelines, considered a model of the Mediterranean Diet, was evaluated for the first time. The data reported here clearly demonstrate that the suggested Italian dietary patterns have a low WF, the reduction of which by replacing animal foods with plant foods is limited because the suggested consumption of meat is already low. Consumer choice in the consumption of specific products within a food group could further reduce the WF of the diet, underlining the need to provide correct information not only to consumers but also to farmers and producers to encourage them to make water-saving choices. MDPI 2023-05-05 /pmc/articles/PMC10181431/ /pubmed/37432353 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu15092204 Text en © 2023 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Bordoni, Alessandra
Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet
title Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet
title_full Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet
title_fullStr Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet
title_full_unstemmed Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet
title_short Insight into the Sustainability of the Mediterranean Diet: The Water Footprint of the Recommended Italian Diet
title_sort insight into the sustainability of the mediterranean diet: the water footprint of the recommended italian diet
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10181431/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37432353
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/nu15092204
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