PhD student: Hafsa Toujgani
Title: Dietary transition of French adults: position in relation to an optimal sustainability trajectory?
Supervisor: Dr Emmanuelle Kesse-Guyot
Doctoral school: ED Galilée, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord
Promotion: 2022-2025
Funding: ANR TRANSFood
Thesis abstract:
Food systems are facing unprecedented challenges, as they have to meet ever-growing demand while ensuring the safety of consumers and drastically reducing environmental pressures. It is clear that responsibilities are shared between the various stakeholders in the food system’s value chain, presenting complex links. This thesis aims to evaluate the dietary changes of French adults in the context of the entire food system “from fork to farm”, and position them on a sustainable trajectory. The NutriNet cohort data will be used to model dietary transitions using a factorial method. A multidisciplinary and multi-criteria approach will be applied to identify the factors that determine these transitions and estimate their impact on sustainability. To this end, indicators of environmental pressures and impacts will be calculated, and a forecast of dietary changes for French adults and associated environmental impacts will be provided. Economic aspects, in particular the cost of the diet, will be considered. Finally, an optimized model will be built, using multi-criteria non-linear optimization under constraints (nutritional and health, environmental, economic), to which the different trajectories previously identified will be compared. This will enable us to identify the levers to be exploited in order to get closer to the optimum, while considering the related obstacles and strategies likely to mitigate them, considering the socio-cultural characteristics of individuals. As a result, this work will provide a breakthrough in research related to issues of public health, nutrition and the environment, by providing a quantification of changes in dietary behavior in terms of overall sustainability. Numerous collaborations will be carried out within the framework of the ANR project (INRAE PNCA, Solagro, CNRS, INRAE GAEL).
