Carbon impact
Nutritional quality
Individual food choices
France
Sustainability
Ecological footprint
Education to sustainable development – France
Sustainable consumption – France
Meat – Consumption – France
Carbon footprint – France
Dietary Surveys
Food behaviours
Nutritional needs

[translated from French]

Health and environment are, with economy and social concerns, two pillars of food sustainability whose compatibility is discussed. They can be estimated through nutritional quality and carbon footprint respectively. In this thesis, we propose to analyze the convergence between nutrition and environment by adopting two different approaches. First, we have estimated the effect of modifying individual food choices on diet-related carbon footprint. Second, by classifying the individuals based on the nutritional quality of their diet, we compared the diet-related carbon footprint among the classes of individuals. First, we have shown that changes in food choices may not be an efficient strategy for reducing the diet-related carbon footprint. Second, the level of carbon footprint did not differ much according to the nutritional quality of diets. A high quality diet even seems associated with a higher carbon footprint.The results lead to question the idea commonly found in the food and nutrition literature that there is a “natural” convergence between promotion of public health and environmental protection. Our approach is original because we have taken into account the variability of realistic individual food consumptions and we estimated the nutritional quality of diets with precision. This topic is a vast field of researches which has to be explored urgently.

Diet – Linear programming
Dietary behaviour – Recommendations for clinical practice
Diet – Evaluation
Nutrition – Needs
Food préférences

[translated from French]

Food-based dietary guidelines have been developed in many countries in order to display to the population simple and practical advices to reach a healthy diet. Nevertheless, those dietary guidelines present some weakness and could be improved. The objective of this thesis was to identify the food-based dietary guideline limitations and to develop a new methodology to overcome these drawbacks. Another objective was to analyse the capability of the nutrient profiling concept to discriminate individual foods depending on their contribution to a healthy diet. An individual diet model, based on linear programming, was specifically developed for each adult participating to the French national INCA dietary survey. For each individual, a new modeled diet respecting both a set of nutritional recommendations, the food budget of the individual and his food preferences was designed. Our results, consistent with most of food-based dietary guidelines, were innovative about 2 points. Firstly, they enlightened the foods necessary to reach the recommendations, and secondly, they allowed us to identify the recommendations that were the most difficult to fulfil. Using the individual diet models, we also demonstrated the relevance of nutrient profiles to link nutrient-based recommendations to food-based dietary guidelines. The individual diet models developed in this thesis are pioneering in the nutrition area and could be very useful during clinical trials to standardize the subject food intakes as well as in public health to support fundamental research.