Swiss Diets

Tipping points toward healthy and sustainable Swiss diets: assessing prescriptions, practices and impacts.

In Switzerland, we have been observing changes in terms of prescriptions and practices that promote healthy and sustainable diets. An open question remains: Do we fully understand how these changes evolve, what the environmental and health impacts of these diets are, and how changes in the direction towards healthier and more sustainable diets could be further supported? The interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research project seeks to uncover tipping points in order to support transitions towards healthy and sustainable diets in the Swiss national context.

The interdisciplinary research team, including the Industrial Ecology Group at the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the Laboratory on Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems at EPFL and Quantis International, along with the active contribution of our partners in the public sector and academia, seeks to:

• engage with social practice theory to uncover how prescribed healthy and sustainable diets emerge involving multiple criteria, from types of food, to food production and provisioning systems.
• implement a health, nutritional and environmental Life Cycle Assessment to compare the environmental and nutritional effects of dietary scenarios, evaluating impacts from production through consumption. 
• analyse drivers and barriers for shifting practices to more healthy and sustainable diets through socio-technical transition theories at the level of people and society.

In addition to delivering new empirical research and further developing conceptual handles, the results of this research project will be relevant to consumer interest groups, and the public policy and private sector alike.