REVIEW article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Nutrition and Sustainable Diets
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1629739
This article is part of the Research TopicFood Systems for Nutrition: Converging Economic, Social, and Environmental SustainabilityView all 10 articles
Sustainable diets, from design to implementation by multi-objective optimization-based methods and policy instruments
Provisionally accepted
- 1Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
- 2TFTAK, Tallinn, Estonia
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The growing concerns over climate change, food security, and public health necessitate a transition towards sustainable diets. However, designing diets that are simultaneously healthy, environmentally friendly, culturally acceptable, and affordable presents significant challenges. This review explores the potential of multi-objective optimization (MOO) as a tool for sustainable diet design and a central element of implementation of optimized diets. MOO allows researchers to balance conflicting objectives, such as minimizing environmental impact while maintaining cultural acceptability and economic feasibility in design and implementation of healthy diets. The review highlights the limitations of traditional singleobjective optimization and emphasizes the need for population-specific dietary recommendations using MOO. Furthermore, the paper identifies barriers to sustainable diet adoption and outlines policy solutions to facilitate dietary transitions. Finally, it underscores the need for the development and implementation of flexible national dietary guidelines to incorporate optimization methods for enhanced sustainability. By integrating mathematical modeling, behavioral insights, and policy interventions, this review outlines a holistic approach to development sustainable food systems capable for meeting efficiently global challenges.
Keywords: Diet, sustainability, multi-objective optimization, policy, Regulations
Received: 16 May 2025; Accepted: 13 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bashiri, Kaleda and Vilu. 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: Raivo Vilu, Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia
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