key: cord-0758359-cjhic29s authors: Batlle-Bayer, Laura; Aldaco, Rubén; Bala, Alba; Puig, Rita; Laso, Jara; Margallo, María; Vázquez-Rowe, Ian; Antó, Josep Maria; Fullana-i-Palmer, Pere title: Environmental and nutritional impacts of dietary changes in Spain during the COVID-19 lockdown date: 2020-08-01 journal: Sci Total Environ DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.141410 sha: 3319ec8ddc1a0c93ca906e36431071db24a0bfdd doc_id: 758359 cord_uid: cjhic29s Abstract The COVID lockdown has affected food purchases and eating habits. In this regard, this short communication assesses the nutritional and environmental impacts of these changes during the COVID lockdown in Spain, by applying Life Cycle Assessment and an energy- and nutrient-corrected functional unit. Three environmental impacts were studied (Global Warming Potential, Blue Water Footprint and Land Use) and a total of seven weekly diet scenarios were designed: two pre-COVID diets for March and April in 2019 (MAR19, APR19), one COVID diet (COVID) and two alternative diets, one based on the National Dietary Guidelines (NDG) and another one on the Planetary Health Diet (PHD). Results show that the COVID diet had larger energy intake and lower nutritional quality, as well as higher environmental impacts (between 30 and 36%) than the pre-COVID eating patterns. Further research is needed to account for food affordability within this assessment, as well as to analyze how eating patterns will evolve after the COVID lockdown. Finally, the definition of short guidelines for sustainable food behaviors for future possible lockdowns is suggested, as well as the introduction of sustainable indicators within NDGs. The coronavirus disease pandemic has forced many countries to establish partial or total lockdowns to stop the exponential increases of deaths and to prevent the collapse of health services. These lockdowns have led to a significant decrease of human and industrial activities, resulting in short-term positive environmental side effects, such as improved water quality (Yunus et al., 2020) and better air quality in urban areas due to lower air pollutants emissions (Li et al., 2020; Nakada and Custodio, 2020; Tobías et al., 2020; Wang and Su, 2020) . However, staying indoors and working remotely can affect daily food habits, increasing the energy intake and the craving for "comfort food" due to boredom and stress (Muscogiuri and Barrea, 2020) . Food purchase in Spanish households has changed abruptly since the beginning of the containment measures on March 14 th 2020 when compared with the same period in previous years (MAPA, 2020b) . Besides the potential nutritional effects, these changes can have an impact on the environment, related to the environmental impacts embedded in purchased food. In this regard, this study assesses the nutritional and environmental impacts -Global Warming Potential (GWP), Blue Water Footprint (BWF) and Land Use (LU) -of food consumption of an average Spanish citizen during the COVID-19 lockdown. Moreover, these results are compared with the impacts in the same period in 2019, as well as with two alternative diets: one following the National Dietary Guidelines (Tur-Marí et al., 2010) and the other one based on the Planetary Health Diet, defined by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019) . To do so, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was applied using an energy-and nutrientbased functional unit (Batlle-Bayer et al., 2019b) . Finally, the ultimate goal of this study is to extract lessons learned from the COVID-19 lockdown and suggest strategies related to food consumption in the event of possible undesirable lockdowns in the future. J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f 2. Methodology Considering that the function of diets is to provide the correct daily intake of energy and nutrients, this study uses an energy-and nutrient (E&N)-based functional unit proposed by Batlle-Bayer et al. (2019) . Hence, the functional unit is defined as the weekly food basket that provides the required intake of energy and nutrients. To fulfil this functional unit, the environmental impacts (EI in Eq. 1) of the food baskets were corrected (represented with c-in Eq.1) on the basis of energy and nutritional aspects (Eq.1). Where, Component α in Eq.1 accounts for energy intake. When the daily energy contained in a diet (DE diet before and during the COVID lockdown. The system boundary of this study uses a cradle to grave approach, thus considering all processes from primary production to consumption and the management of food being wasted at the consumer stage; packaging waste management was not considered. This study considers seven weekly diet scenarios, four of them corresponding to the 2019 period before the lockdown and three during the lockdown (Table 1) Data on the embedded greenhouse gas emissions to produce, distribute and consume the food products considered within the food baskets were based on Batlle-Bayer et al. (2019a), except for the production of eggs, which was updated to the Spanish context (Abín et al., 2018) . Furthermore, mushrooms and strawberries were added in the food baskets due to data availability within the Spanish context (Leiva et al., 2015; Romero-Gámez and Suárez-Rey, 2020) . Data on blue water and land use for all food products were based on Batlle-Bayer et al. Food purchase during the COVID confinement was assumed to be consumed (i.e., ingested and wasted) within the same week of purchase. Hence, no food storage was taken into account. However, large amounts of food purchase were reported in the first week of the confinement, which could be related to the behaviour of citizens stock-piling food as a way to cope with possible future food shortages or low food accessibility. Hence, to avoid the overestimation of food being consumed in one specific week, this study used the average weekly changes of food purchase during the first 6 weeks of confinement. In addition, it was assumed that no changes with respect to previous trends occurred in household food waste generation and management during the COVID lockdown. In addition, FAFH consumption was assumed to be zero during the lockdown. During the COVID lockdown, the average weekly food purchase of a Spanish citizen (ca. 13.8 kg per capita; see Fig.1a ) increased compared with household consumption in the same period in 2019. However, it did not exceed the total amount of food of MAR19 and APR19 (about 14.3 kg per capita), which considered the household and FAFH consumption. In terms of food composition, the COVID food basket presented lower amounts of beverages (especially beer and coffee), a slight increase in the acquisition of eggs and red meat, and a substantial increase of plant-based foods (especially processed vegetables, fruits, nuts and pasta/rice) as compared the food baskets in 2019. Nevertheless, the consumption of plantbased food products was still below those recommended by dietary guidelines, whereas red meat consumption remained high (Fig.1a) . The daily energy intake of the COVID diet was 2,509 kcal (Fig.1b) , which represented an increase of 6% with respect to 2019 (i.e., MAR19 and APR19), and 27% higher than the recommended value (PHD1970; see Table 2 ). Regarding the nutritional quality, the NRD9.3 of the COVID diet was 5% lower than the ones of MAR19 and APR19, and 33% lower than the one of PHD1970 (Table 3) . In terms of diet-related environmental impacts, the COVID diet had 30%, 35% and 36% higher values for corrected GWP, BWF and LU, respectively, than the ones of APR19 and MAR19 ( Fig.2a,c,e) . This is mainly due to the nutritional aspect -the low values of the energy intake and the nutritional scores calculated for the COVID diet (Table 2) , which are used to correct the environmental impacts of diets -, since little differences are found when correction is not applied (Tables S1, S2 and S3). Compared with the NDG-and PHD-based diets, the COVID diet has much larger values for all three environmental impacts. This is due to the food composition of these recommended diets, that rely on substantially lower red meat intake and more plant-based food, as well as the nutritional aspect (i.e., α, NS). The novelty of this study resides in that, to our knowledge, it is the first one to comprehensively assess the nutritional and environmental impacts of dietary changes occurring during the COVID lockdown in Spain. In addition, the methodological novelty is related to the comparison of the environmental performance between diets that differ in energy and nutritional intakes as well as in the recommended intake values. Results show that the average COVID eating pattern consumes 539 kcal more than the recommended diet during confinement; it has lower nutritional quality, and increases environmental impacts by approximately 30-35% as compared with the diet in the same period in 2019. Furthermore, the COVID diet presented a threefold increase in environmental impacts when compared to the Planetary Health Diet. These results suggest the requirement to establish strategies to ensure sustainable food habits in the future, including those occurring in a possible future lockdown, such as designing short sustainable food production and consumption guidelines. As highlighted in previous studies (Batlle-Bayer et al., 2020a; Blackstone et al., 2018; Song et al., 2017; Springmann et al., 2018) Despite the importance of the results presented, several limitations to this study must be highlighted. First, changes in food loss and waste along the supply chain during the COVID lockdown were not considered. However, changes in household food waste generation can be expected (Aldaco et al., 2020; Jribi et al., 2020) . They can either increase due to overbuying or inappropriate food storage, or decrease if consumers are making better use of the stocked food and leftovers. Second, the economic aspect of food affordability (defined as the food expenditure from the consumption income) of dietary patterns was not considered due to lack of data on the consumption income during the COVID lockdown. This analysis will be required once data are available, and focus should be given to low income households, since the purchasing power of this socioeconomic group is bound to have decreased during the pandemic. Within this group, special attention should be paid to certain vulnerable groups, such as migrants and refugees, which may have distinct dietary patterns to those of the rest of the country. In this respect, we suggest the application of the methodology proposed by Batlle-Bayer et al. (2020b) to integrate the economic, nutritional and environmental assessment of diets. 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