| Title | Deliverable 7.3: Initial model for designing SHARP diets |
|---|---|
| Paper authors | |
| Date | May 28 2018 |
| Description | Designing healthier diets is a complex process which can have substantial public health benefits.The intakes, but also the requirements of multiple important nutrients for different population groups should be taken into account. Moreover, the current dietary preferences of individuals should be considered to promote the acceptability of the diet. Diet models have been developed and used for designing suchhealthier and acceptable diets. The main objective of these models is to determine the optimal quantities of available food items that should be included in a diet to optimize a specific indicator (e.g. maximize a dietary quality index). Additional constraints are defined to improve the acceptability of the calculated diets. These constraints are either in the form of upper and lower limits to the intake of specific food-items or in the form of fixed combinations of food-items in meals. Defining such constraints explicitly is challenging and involves expert knowledge and a substantial degree of arbitrariness. To avoid defining such acceptability constraints we propose a DEA based diet model that benchmarks existing complete diets of a certain population and in our case identifies healthier alternatives. However, the model's flexibility allows for additional dimensions to be included, such as sustainability indicators and prices. The method was applied successfully to benchmark alternative diets of a group of individuals in the Netherlands. |
| Category | Deliverables |
| URL | |
| Corresponding Author(s) | Argyris Kanellopoulos (WUR) |
| Authors at SUSFANS | |
| Work package |
