Nutritional, environmental and socio-economic assessment of several dietary menus; to move towards a sustainable development of agricultural practices and nutritional recommendations.

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

AGRALID

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2013

End date

7/1/2016

Budget

726,663 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

AGRALID project involves a multidisciplinary team of 9 partners (INRA PEGASE, INRA URA and PEAT, INRA SAS, LARESS-ESA, LESMA-Audencia, Bleu Blanc Coeur, Valorex, Terrena, and CERNh Développement). The project focuses on developing a tool to help define the best dietary strategies that conciliate human health, animal welfare, agricultural biodiversity, and environmental impacts of food production. The project is centred on the consumer whose eating habits are quite pervasively present. The main objective of the project is to offer the consumer: 1/ A better access to more balanced food, especially regarding lipid content in products of animal origin with a focus on restoring a good balance between Omega 3 (n-3 FAs) and Omega 6 (n-6 FAs), diminishing saturated fatty acids, altogether with a better consideration of the environmental impact. 2/ An optimization guide for eating practices that will bring the consumer solutions, only slightly modifying his eating habits, to strike a good balance regarding the three dimensions: environment, nutrition and cost. Starting with defined weekly menus, representatives of the eating habits of the french population, the project will establish a database on the threedimensional impact (nutrition, environment and socio-economy) of the food items that constitute those menus. As it is extremely difficult to change consumer habits, the project focuses on food items quality, more specifically on food items of animal origin, as those are the most impacting on nutrition, environment and socio-economy. Thus, the project will propose and analyse diverses solutions to optimize agricultural products of animal origin, experimenting new feed sources and the acceptation by the producers of the agricultural practices associated. The three dimensional impact of those optimized food items will be measured and integrated in the database. Using multivariate statistics the project will position the original weekly menus, with or without optimized food items, with regard to soci-economic perception (consumer and producer point of view), nutritional quality and environmental impact. Using linear programming, the project will extend this analysis to other types of menus, thus developping a decision making tool or an optimization guide that will position diverse menus on three cursors: the environmental cursor, the nutritionnal cursor and the socio-economic cursor. This tool will not only address the consumer but also all other actors of the food chain: farmers; national authorities, actors of the food transformation industry; actors from the catering sector.