The HEAT project
Health and Environmental Assessment of Diet Transition
The HEAT project develops optimization models to identify dietary solutions that balance human health, environmental sustainability, economic feasibility, and cultural preferences for 10 European countries.
It addresses how diets can transition to reduce chronic disease and environmental impact while remaining feasible, affordable, and culturally acceptable, based on the national food landscapes.
HEAT combines nutrition science, epidemiology, and life cycle assessment with mathematical modelling and optimization to explore how interactions between food groups and disease outcomes can guide environmentally and financially feasible diet transitions across ten countries, which adequately represent Western, Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe.
Increasing incidences of chronic diseases and climate change are two of the most pressing global challenges, both strongly influenced by dietary patterns.
Current diets in Europe often fail to exploit available health promotion through nutrition while placing heavy pressure on the environment.
Optimization models make it possible to achieve optimized compromises so that diets can improve public health and reduce environmental burdens at the same time.
Such compromises must take cultural nutrition preferences into account. The optimum solutions for this problem are yet unknown.
The HEAT project systematically investigates the interactions between food groups, disease outcomes, and environmental impacts to quantify potential disease burden reduction and to assess trade-offs between human health and planetary health.
The HEAT project optimizes dietary patterns to minimize potential disease burden, applying Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) envelopes from the Global Burden of Disease study.
Optimization builds on dietary survey data from up to ten European countries and integrates nutrient requirements, cultural acceptability, environmental footprints (greenhouse gas emissions, water use, land use, fossil resource use, acidification), and financial feasibility.
The evidence base for health optimization is taken from dose-response meta-regression analyses as documented in systematic reviews.
Comparative risk assessment is used to quantify health impacts, while life cycle assessment databases capture environmental impacts.
By combining these elements, the project identifies dietary scenarios that reveal the trade-offs and synergies between human health and planetary health
The project started in December 2024 and findings are in progress.
Expected outputs include methodological frameworks for integrating epidemiology and environmental sustainability in diet modelling, country-specific scenarios for sustainable diets, and scientific articles in nutrition and sustainability journals.
Results will also be communicated at international conferences, through stakeholder engagement, and via podcasts and public science communication events.
A central outcome of this project will be the quantification potential reductions in disease burden and the identification of trade-offs between human health, planetary health, and financial feasibility.
Internal researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adam Istvan Fogarasi | Enrolled PhD Student | ||
| Alexandr Parlesak | Associate Professor | +4535323120 | |
| Inge Tetens | Professor | +4535332127 |
Eksternal researchers
| Name | Title | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| Lea Brader | PhD | Arla Foods |
| Anna Flysjö | PhD | Arla Foods |
Funded by
- Innovation Fund Denmark (Industrial PhD grant)
- Arla Foods
- University of Copenhagen
Project period: December 2024 – February 2028.
Contact
Professor Inge Tetens, ite@nexs.ku.dk