Environmental and nutritional perspective of a more sustainable meat consumption in Brazil

Regular consumption of meat products has positive and negative effects on people’s health. Meat consumption is responsible for the majority of the dietary environmental impact of Brazilians. In this context, our paper aims to investigate the environmental and nutritional impacts of more sustainable meat consumption in Brazil. We collected data from the National Dietary Survey for food intake and the life cycle assessment literature database for environmental footprints. We used the ANOVA test to compare the nutritional and environmental impact of the base scenario with three different scenarios of reduction in meat consumption in Brazil. Our results showed that the proposed scenarios reduced the current meat intake by 25–50% and had a positive healthy effect due to the reduction in 24–75% of saturated fat, and 26–69% of cholesterol intake, but also possible negative healthy effect mainly due to the reduction in 26–68% of protein, 24–75% of iron, and 24–78% of zinc intake. A reduction in Brazilian meat consumption also implies a decrease in the dietary environmental impact in terms of carbon footprint by 16–55%, and water footprint and ecological footprint by 12–35% on average. Our results contribute toward policymakers to better understand meat dietary nutritional and environmental impact in Brazil, and to inform a sustainability framework to help actions in food and nutrition policy development in Brazil.