Chapter 10

Conclusion: Delivering healthy diets under complexity and interconnectedness

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Chapter 10 of 10
Contents

A large and growing body of global commitments frames nutrition as an outcome requiring action across food systems and health systems. The food system sustainability and transformation agenda has emphasised dietary shifts towards plant-based, nutrient-dense foods and reduced intake of red meat, sugar and ultra-processed products, revealing how these shifts depend on both demand and supply.[1][2][3][4]

Supply-side measures are needed to expand access to diverse, nutrient-dense foods by strengthening value chains, reducing post-harvest loss and spoilage and aligning incentives so producers and businesses can supply healthier options at scale, particularly through production incentives, healthier food procurement and processing, better storage (which would also reduce food loss) and fairer retail prices and access.[5][6]

On the demand side, guidance of consumer preferences towards healthier food can be shaped through nutrition education and literacy that highlights the value and benefits of healthier diets.[7][8] Awareness will need to be accompanied by food environment measures that increase purchasing power and ensure the availability, affordability, convenience and desirability of healthier foods for all consumer groups, especially for low-income consumers, who often cannot afford healthier options.[9][10][11]

Health systems can strengthen this shift by promoting healthier nutrition through counselling, treatment adherence, supplementation and fortification platforms and targeted support for groups facing higher nutritional risk, while also responding to diet-related disease burdens that influence household food choices. This is why nutrition should be increasingly positioned as a core function of universal health coverage and primary healthcare, delivered through life-course packages of essential nutrition actions alongside non-communicable disease prevention and basic treatment in routine care.[12][13]

Yet, the complexity of implementing such a broad portfolio of actions, especially under escalating climate pressures, can appear daunting, discouraging stakeholders, from governments and global agencies to civil society organisations.[14][15] Multiple needs, competing priorities and cross-system interdependencies accumulate faster than decision-making and delivery capacity, leaving actors uncertain about where to focus first and how to proceed.

While the full set of recommendations is presented in Chapter 8, a small number of priority actions stand out for each actor group. For governments, the highest-impact entry points are integrating nutrition into existing primary healthcare and social protection platforms, where delivery infrastructure is already in place, and embedding nutrition targets within national climate strategies (NDCs and NAPs) to unlock climate finance and strengthen cross-sector governance. For donors, development banks and climate finance providers, the priority is to shift towards multi-year, flexible financing that supports integrated food–health delivery and maintains services during shocks, while investing in domestic financing systems so that implementation is not wholly dependent upon external aid. For global platforms and accountability bodies, evolving accountability from procedural compliance to substantive integration by assessing whether commitments are backed by secured financing, cross-sector coordination and adequate delivery capacity can strengthen the credibility and impact of the global commitment architecture. For civil society and community-based organisations, the priority is to secure formal space in governance and planning processes, linking community platforms to both food and health systems to support service uptake, mutual accountability and resilience during crises. For the private sector, transparent nutrition and emissions disclosure, aligned with guiding principles agreed at the N4G Paris 2025 Summit, is a necessary foundation for credible engagement.

Within this context, the framework presented in this report is useful because it makes interdependencies visible, identifies where synergies can be captured and flags trade-offs that require explicit management. The framework is not a silver-bullet solution, and it does not remove the governance, financing and operational constraints that shape delivery. However, building on long-standing calls for bundled action, the framework can serve as a starting point for operationalising integration across systems and defining plausible first steps, supporting more coherent commitment and intervention packages and clearer accountability for environmental soundness and resilience, social equity and gender empowerment and economic prosperity across food and health systems.[16][17] Ultimately, multi-stakeholder involvement and flexible monitoring and evaluation will be critical for continuously improving commitments and interventions, building synergies and managing sometimes unanticipated trade-offs or unexpected shocks. Among the policy levers available, one stands out for its potential to anchor this integration: positioning nutrition as a core function of universal health coverage and primary healthcare. Doing so would embed life-course nutrition actions, from counselling and supplementation to growth monitoring and diet-related non-communicable disease prevention, within the delivery platform that reaches the largest number of people, particularly women and children in low- and middle-income countries. It would also create a durable institutional home for nutrition within health systems, reducing the risk that nutrition is treated as a discretionary add-on vulnerable to funding cuts. Achieving healthy diets for all will require action well beyond the health sector, across food systems, social protection, climate policy and governance. But a health system that treats nutrition as central to its mandate can serve as both a foundation and an accelerator for this broader transformation.

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Footnotes

  1. High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition. Reducing inequalities for food security and nutrition. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2023. https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e9fc6d23-a6e8-44b0-b8ff-e80b4a8a561f/content.

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  2. International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems. From uniformity to diversity: a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems. International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, 2016. https://www.ipes-food.org/_img/upload/files/UniformityToDiversity_FULL.pdf.

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  3. Rockstrom J, Thilsted S, Willett W, et al. EAT–Lancet Commission 2.0: securing a just transition to healthy, environmentally sustainable diets for all. The Lancet 2023; 402: 352–4.

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  4. Rockström J, Thilsted SH, Willett WC, et al. The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. The Lancet 2025; 406: 1625–700.

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  5. Kuiper M, Cui HD. Using food loss reduction to reach food security and environmental objectives – A search for promising leverage points. Food Policy 2021; 98: 101915.

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  6. Magrini M, Anton M, Cholez C, et al. Why are grain-legumes rarely present in cropping systems despite their environmental and nutritional benefits? Analyzing lock-in in the French agrifood system. Ecological Economics 2016; 126: 152–62.

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  7. Bailey CJ, Drummond MJ, Ward PR. Food literacy programmes in secondary schools: a systematic literature review and narrative synthesis of quantitative and qualitative evidence. Public Health Nutrition 2019; 22: 2891–913.

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  8. Hawkes C. Promoting Healthy Diets through Nutrition Education and Changes in the Food Environment: An International Review of Actions and their Effectiveness. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2013. https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/0eb72612-c542-42fa-81a0-a12dff110346 (accessed Feb 24, 2026).

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  9. Rockström J, Thilsted SH, Willett WC, et al. The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy, sustainable, and just food systems. The Lancet 2025; 406: 1625–700.

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  10. Marteau TM, Conti C, Bunge AC, et al. Food environment interventions to shift consumption patterns towards planetary health diets for all: protocol for a scoping review of reviews. 2023; published online May 6. DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/KBFEP.

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  11. Marteau TM, Hollands GJ, Pechey R, Reynolds JP, Jebb SA. Changing the assortment of available food and drink for leaner, greener diets. BMJ 2022; 377: 1–6.

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  12. World Health Organization. Essential nutrition actions: mainstreaming nutrition through the life-course. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, 2019. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241515856.

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  13. Global Nutrition Report. 2021 Global Nutrition Report: The State of Global Nutrition. Bristol, UK: Development Initiatives, 2021. https://globalnutritionreport.org/reports/2021-global-nutrition-report/ (accessed Oct 23, 2025).

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  14. Conti C, Hall A, Kok K, et al. A quest for questions: the JUSTRA as a matrix for navigating just food system transformations in an era of uncertainty. One Earth 2025; 8: 101178.

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  15. Mason-D’Croz D, Kugler C, Remans R, et al. Rigorous anticipatory governance is needed for responsible food system transformation. Nature Food 2025; 6: 920–6.

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  16. Barrett CB, Benton T, Fanzo J, et al. Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-88802-2.

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  17. Sundiang M, Oliveira TD, Mason-D’Croz D, et al. Bundling measures for food systems transformation: a global, multimodel assessment. The Lancet Planetary Health 2025; 9.

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