Sustainable nutrition: integrating food systems, environmental science, and diet to advance public and planetary health

Abstract

Nutrition science has traditionally focused on dietary intake, nutrient metabolism, physiology, and health outcomes. Although these domains remain fundamental, advancing public health increasingly requires understanding nutrition within the broader systems that shape food production, processing, access, consumption, and environmental sustainability. This Perspective proposes sustainable nutrition as a unifying concept: maintaining nutritional status that supports growth, development, and health across the lifespan while accounting for population needs, context, and the capacity and resilience of food systems. We describe a Nutritional Ecology framework that conceptualizes nutrition as the product of dynamic, reciprocal interactions among human biology, dietary patterns, food systems, and environmental conditions. Agricultural practices affect food quantity, quality, nutrient composition, biodiversity, water resources, greenhouse gas emissions, and ecosystem resilience, while environmental change influences crop productivity, nutrient density, food safety, and nutrition security. Dietary patterns simultaneously affect chronic disease risk and the environmental footprint of food systems. These interdependencies argue against evaluating human health and environmental sustainability in isolation. We therefore call for a transformation toward integrated, systems-based nutrition research that incorporates biological variability, environmental drivers, and system-level interactions. Multidisciplinary collaborations spanning nutrition, food, agricultural, environmental, epidemiologic, computational, systems, and implementation sciences will be essential. Emerging approaches, including systems mapping, network analysis, computational modeling, artificial intelligence, and multiscale data integration, can identify trade-offs and leverage points for intervention. Integrating nutrition, food systems, and environmental science is a scientific necessity for generating evidence across diverse population contexts that supports resilient food systems, effective dietary guidance, improved clinical care, healthier people, and a healthier planet.