A UK university’s clever menu shuffle shows how small, invisible changes to dining options can drive big gains for both health and the planet, no new recipes required.
Study: Dish swap across a weekly menu can deliver health and sustainability gains. Image credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock.com
A weekly menu with 15 dishes across five days can be tweaked to produce hundreds of combinations that could yield healthier meals without excessively repeating foods or restricting customer preferences. The concept was tested in a UK university residence over two separate optimized weekly menus in four weeks, including about 5,000 meals. The results were published in Nature Food.
Introduction
Dietary health changes are notoriously difficult to sustain. Approaches to achieving long-term food choice shifts include educating and informing the target group, providing different food choices related to each food event, regulating some foods, like alcohol, by age of consumption, or providing positive or negative incentives for specific foods.
Education and regulation have proved more successful with habits like smoking and drinking than dietary changes, which require a more nuanced approach. Firstly, since food is key to maintaining life, interventions cannot emphasize cessation, such as smoking; instead, the goal must be to eat more healthy foods. Secondly, competition between different foods on the menu means that people choose one meal option and cannot eat alternative meals at that time.
The researchers note that this “competition structure” creates opportunities for strategic menu design to shift choices toward healthier and more sustainable options, while ensuring that everyone’s most preferred dish remains available. These principles were important in the current study.
Investigators aimed to observe the benefits of shuffling foods on a limited menu so that different (healthier) choices are available and chosen more often. This could potentially benefit about 42% of workers in the UK who have their meals at a canteen and over nine million schoolchildren who can eat at school canteens.
About the study
The current study was held in a UK university residence and covered about 5,000 meals for 300 students over four weeks. The aim was to see how changing the food-choice architecture impacted dietary health and sustainability regarding saturated fat intake and carbon footprint. If successful, it could also be extended to other environmental indicators and dietary health markers.
Simply swapping around the 15 dishes would yield over 1.4 million menu combinations. One vegan meal was included daily to meet most residents' dietary requirements. This constraint removed 1,288,000 combinations from consideration, resulting in 113,400 feasible menu options. Differences in individual preferences were considered using data from 70 students, who ranked dishes in a computer-based two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task before the intervention.
Two weekly menus were optimized from the feasible set of combinations according to the preferences of a representative consumer sample. The menus contained the same 15 dishes but in different daily combinations. These were then introduced as blind interventions. Data on meal selection were collected from the whole population of consumers. Since only population-level data were gathered, an inferential statistical test could not be performed.
This allowed researchers to calculate the total weekly carbon footprint (projected) and saturated fat intake.
Study findings
The current study analyzed ~5,000 meal selections, allowing for robust inferences.
Changing the food combinations around between the three daily meals, five days a week, led to inadvertent and significant reductions in the consumption of saturated fats by an average of 6.3% (week-by-week: 11.3% and 1.4%), while the carbon footprint of the food fell by an average of 30.7% (31.4% and 30.0% for the two weeks). When compared to the EAT-Lancet guidelines, the current study achieved 38% of the recommended reduction in carbon footprint by dish swapping, without requiring any changes in procurement or recipes on the producer’s side, or consumer preferences.
The approach was tested for generalizability by applying the optimization procedure to assess the change in four markers of environmental performance: carbon footprint, eutrophication potential, water use, and land use, concerning the dietary content of fiber, salt, sugar, and saturated fatty acids. In 31/32 cases, both outcomes improved, some by as much as ~70%. For example, the authors report a 69.2% increase in fiber intake while reducing eutrophication potential by 31.7%.
Overall consumer satisfaction did not change significantly after dish swapping, but the method used to assess this requires further work. Most importantly, the dishes themselves do not change. This tool’s simplicity lends itself to wider use in multiple sectors in the future, including canteens in educational and healthcare facilities. This plan can be used independently and alongside other strategies to ensure the dishes are novel and sustainable.
Conclusions
Meal swapping led to a 30.7% reduction in the carbon footprint and a 6.3% reduction in saturated fat intake. This indicates the positive effect on healthy eating and sustainability of the diet of users of this university canteen.
“This demonstrates the potential of strategic menu manipulation to benefit health and the environment, without the need for recipe changes.”
Further research could focus on maximizing profit and vegetable consumption while minimizing food waste and the distance between the producer and the table.
Scalability is a concern before this tool can be widely adopted. This would require software that allows catering staff to use it easily; training for these personnel to collect meal preference data from canteen users, and user-led quantification of their food's nutritional and environmental effects. Alternatively, future versions might integrate with existing catering sales data to bypass separate preference surveys.
This might permit such systems to be used directly with catering organizational tools that provide such data. The outcome could help population groups to eat healthier diets and promote agricultural sustainability.
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