The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have formulated principles of what constitute healthy diets, underpinned by guidelines and other normative elements developed by the two Organizations. The principles provide the basis for the design of policies aimed at improving diet and for the assessment of the healthiness of diets. In 1 to 14 pages of the joint statement ‘What are healthy diets’ the two organisations divide the subject as – principles of healthy diets – Adequate, Balanced, Moderate, and Diverse.
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The statement’s ‘In conclusion: celebrating healthy dietary patterns’ sums up the statement as:
While the principles of healthy diets are universal, dietary patterns – the combinations of foods and beverages consumed over time – are highly contextual. Dietary patterns are determined by a wide variety of social, economic and environmental factors including individual preferences and beliefs, culture, traditions, religion, income and the availability and affordability of foods. Many dietary patterns can be healthy, as long as they meet the four core principles outlined above and are made up of safe foods.
Recommended healthy dietary patterns in context are articulated in national dietary guidelines that are based on local considerations and evidence and that provide recommendations for combinations of food groups, their proportionality and sometimes frequency.
Dietary patterns also have important implications for the environment through their impact on agrifood systems, including greenhouse gas emissions and use of natural resources (land and water, biodiversity and deforestation). Dietary patterns are also impacted and shaped by agrifood systems that, in many contexts, are constrained to provide enough nutritious food for all because of the overuse of natural resources compounded by antimicrobial resistance, zoonoses, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution and other issues. Shifts to healthy dietary patterns must therefore be an important pillar of agrifood systems’ transformation and can contribute to overcoming the current inequities in access to healthy diets.
Food-based dietary guidelines have long been used by countries to characterize healthy diets in context, and to inform consumer education. Such guidelines have the potential for utilization far beyond consumer education, and to bring the environmental, socio-cultural and economic considerations needed to enable healthy diets for all to the forefront in characterizing healthy diets from sustainable agrifood systems in context. Taking these aspects into consideration, a new methodology for the development of dietary guidelines with an agrifood systems’ lens will soon be published by FAO (46).
With this statement we urge consistency in framing of healthy diets based on the four core principles outlined here, and comprised of safe foods and water. We also encourage everyone, everywhere, to recognize and celebrate the diversity of healthy dietary patterns and the sustainable agrifood systems that can promote and protect human and planetary health. We urge all governments to develop (or update) and use dietary guidelines developed with an agrifood systems’ lens to inform policies and programmes that promote and enable healthy dietary patterns from sustainable agrifood systems for all.”
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What are healthy diets? Joint statement by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization. Geneva: World Health Organization and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; 2024. https://doi.org/10.4060/cd2223en. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.
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