High-income countries dietary trajectories diverge from the global nutrition transition

Countries with rising incomes typically undergo a nutrition transition, marked by increasing consumption of animal-sourced foods and declining intakes of cereals and other plant-based products. However, large-scale, data-driven assessments of how diets worldwide align with this transition remain scarce. Here, we analyse dietary regimes in 188 countries, from 1970 to 2021, covering 370 food products, and identify a nutrition transition occurring at the global scale. On average, every tenfold increase in a country’s per capita gross domestic product corresponds to a 13% rise in the dietary share of calories supplied by animal products and to a 15% decline in the share supplied by cereals. Nonetheless, in several high-income countries, such as Canada, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the UK, the dietary composition diverges from global trends, exhibiting declining caloric shares from animal-sourced foods alongside rising contributions from cereals and plant-based products.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Environmental Research: Food Systems

• Publication date

  2026-01-27

• Fields of study

  Agricultural and Food Sciences, Physics, Economics, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1088/2976-601X/ae3ded
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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