Healthy and Sustainable Foods and Products

This course will introduce you to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA ) methodology, a tool to assess the environmental impact of products and systems over the whole product life cycle, from cradle to grave. After a discussion of the potentials and limitations of quantitative LCA compared to other assessment tools, we will detail and practice each of the LCA phases. 1) The goals and system definition phase defines the goal and scope of the study, including the product function, functional unit, and the product system and its boundaries. 2) The Life Cycle Inventory phase quantifies the inventory of the various elementary flows of resource extractions and substance emissions crossing the system boundary, providing an overview of existing databases. 3) The life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) phase determines multiple environmental impacts damage and provides an overview of the existing LCIA methods 4) The interpretation phase analyses results from an LCA case study to provide recommendations towards more sustainable products. Leading actions in several industrial sectors (agriculture and foods, automotive, personal care products, and energy) will be examined through relevant case studies in order to demonstrate how effective environmental life-cycle assessment leads to new product development.

This course focuses on healthy and sustainable foods. After reviewing the crucial role of food for both health and the environment, we first look at the carbon footprint and environmental impacts of multiple ingredients and more complex foods. We also detail a health-based approach to quantify the impact of 5000+ individual foods on health, expressed in minutes of life lost and gain per serving. We then analyze trade-offs and targeted changes that can bring substantial health and environmental benefits with less than 10% caloric change. We finally address the health and sustainable performances of various diets, looking at disparities between gender, races and diets.

This course is an introductory and foundational course on sustainable consumption and health. In the first part of this course, we briefly review definitions of sustainability and the relationship between the three dimensions of sustainability and the UN-Environment Sustainable Environment Goals (SDGs), target and indicators. We then look at frameworks, indicators and footprint requirements to adequately measure sustainability, offering the opportunity to the participants to assess their own carbon and environmental footprint and make recommendation on how to reduce it. We then address the theme of sustainable consumption, looking at our main domains of consumption and at the key conditions to reach sustainable consumption and avoid rebounds effects that tend to reduce the benefits of increased product efficiency. We finally look at "what is good enough" for a given product or activity, in relationship with absolute sustainability and planetary boundaries. In the second part focusing on health, we will first identify the main factors affecting health, define DALYs (disability-adjusted life years) as a key metric to measure health burden, and use the rich information made available by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD). We will then use the GBD visualization tool to quantify and compare the respective burdens associated with 70 risks factors and numerous disease causes, in every country of the world and even at the state level for the US. We finally analyze the health impact associated with global trade, evaluating the fraction of the health impacts due to fine particulate in Asia, that are induced by Western consumption.