Evaluating the Impact of the Proposed Dietary Guideline on Red and Processed Meat: Agricultural, Environmental, and Economic Perspectives

In June 2023, the Nordic Council of Ministers released the sixth edition of the Nordic Nutrient Recommendations (NNR2023), developed in collaboration with the Nordic and Baltic countries. The NNR2023 is based on a scientific review of nutritional evidence, with expert committees translating this research into practical dietary guidelines (Christensen et al., 2020). The NNR2023 is currently being translated to national food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) in the Nordic and Baltic countries. The NNR2023 also introduced environmental considerations in FBDG alongside health aspects. Previous versions of the NNR provided FBDG only based on the health dimension. This report is an update to Mistra Food Futures Report #21 (Slijper et al. 2024), which analysed the consequences of implementing the NNR2023 in Sweden based on both environmental and health considerations and compared it to the NNR2023 implementation based only on health considerations in terms of production and environmental outcomes
During the process of updating the Swedish national dietary guidelines in line with the NNR2023 the Swedish Food Agency has been asked by the Swedish government to further analyze the effects of the new recommendation for red meat consumption. Therefore, this report focuses solely on possible effects of the health-based quantitative recommendation for red meat.
The aim of this report was to analyse the possible impact of changing from the current consumption to 5% and 30% additional compliance with the recommendation on red meat (350 g ready to eat meat per person and week) on agricultural land use, biodiversity (assessed by area of semi-natural pastureland used), animal numbers, climate impact and ammonia emissions. We focus on the Swedish agricultural sector but include estimates on impacts abroad due to changes in import of feed and food products. Climate impact due to potential land use changes in Sweden is analysed and compared with literature values for the import. Further, we discuss possible impacts due to changes in demand on the Swedish food value chain with regards to how dietary changes may influence (i) primary producers (e.g. farmers), (ii) consumers, and (iii) broader implications for food value chains.
The remainder of this report is organised as follows. In section 2, we give a short overview of Mistra Food Futures Report #21 (Slijper et al. 2024), which serves as the starting point for this report. Section 3 then introduces our environmental modelling approach to assess how various levels of reduced red meat consumption influence production and environmental outcomes. Section 4 discusses implications of the modelled dietary changes on the food value chain. Section 5 discusses how impacts on semi-natural pastures. Finally, section 6 provides some concluding remarks.