ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutritional Epidemiology
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnut.2025.1678148
This article is part of the Research TopicRevolutionizing Nutritional Epidemiology: Harnessing Digital Health, AI, and Big Data for Population-Level Disease Prevention and ManagementView all 3 articles
Dietary Assessment at the Confluence of Public and Planetary Health: Introduction of the DIEM (dietary impacts on environmental measures) Scoring System
Provisionally accepted
David L. Katz1*
Marie Janiszewski2
Lauren Q Rhee1*Martin C Heller3
Gidon Eshel4
Dina L Aronson1Emily Barrett1- 1Intend, Inc, Birmingham, United States
- 2Department of Nutrition, Harvard University, Cambridge, United States
- 3AgResilience Consulting, LLC, Traverse City, United States
- 4Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, United States
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1 2 The environmental impacts of foods—including, notably, land use, water use, nitrogen inputs, 3 and greenhouse gas emissions—are substantial and widely varied. Databases that quantify these 4 separate impacts exist, but few aggregate these component measures into a consumer actionable 5 score for the overall environmental impact of given food choices. Whereas data are readily 6 accessible for individual food items, information about overall dietary patterns—combining 7 individual item impacts into a unified, numerical environmental score—is less so. A means of 8 generating an environmental impact score based on real-time dietary intake assessment and/or 9 goal diet selection has not been established. Understanding environmental impacts at this dietary 10 pattern level is especially relevant for informing consumer action. Leveraging available 11 published databases for food environmental impacts and nutrient analysis, combined with novel 12 intellectual property that stratifies dietary patterns into operationally-defined diet types and 13 objectively measured (HEI-2020) diet quality, we developed a unified scale for environmental 14 impacts of overall dietary pattern. We further integrated this approach into real-time dietary 15 intake assessment and personalized goal setting. Here, we introduce the DIEM (Dietary 16 Impacts on Environmental Measures) scoring system, describe its development, and explore its 17 key implications. The guiding objective is to motivate and empower consumers to reduce their 18 personal dietary environmental footprint while improving diet quality. 19
Keywords: Environmental impact, Planetary health, Sustainable diets, Dietary patterns, diet quality, Scoring system
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 23 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Katz, Janiszewski, Rhee, Heller, Eshel, Aronson and Barrett. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
David L. Katz, katzdl@aya.yale.edu
Lauren Q Rhee, lauren.rhee@jointangelo.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.