Environmental Impact Score for Overall Dietary Pattern Available for First Time

DIEM is the latest addition to Diet ID's digital health platform, enabling users to understand and reduce their dietary environmental footprint.

DETROIT, MI, UNITED STATES, October 3, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Diet ID™, a leader in digital diet assessment and behavior change tools and a subsidiary of Tangelo, the leading food-as-medicine company, announces the launch of 'DIEM' (Dietary Impacts on Environmental Measures). This new feature provides a first-of-its-kind quantified score for the environmental footprint of an entire dietary pattern, empowering businesses, healthcare providers, and employers to guide their populations toward choices that benefit both their health and the planet.

In an upcoming release, DIEM scores, applied to the wide array of dietary patterns incorporated into Diet ID’s patented diet map, will allow any given user to navigate to a preferred dietary pattern to minimize their diet’s environmental footprint. This innovative tool will present a crucial opportunity for individuals to "seize the day" by taking control of their personal environmental impact while improving their diet quality at the same time. In this initial release, Diet ID partners will gain valuable insights into their users’ environmental footprint while providing critical data for setting strategic ESG goals.

With food production accounting for a significant portion of environmental degradation—including land use, water consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions—the connection between diet and the environment has never been clearer. Diet quality not only influences personal health outcomes but also has substantial implications for planetary health. To date, validated measures have been focused on the environmental impact of individual foods, and have not provided a comprehensive view of overall dietary patterns. Taking advantage of the novel tools already patented and validated by Diet ID, DIEM bridges this gap by offering a holistic approach to measuring the environmental footprint of entire diets.

The DIEM metric was derived from scientifically robust, publicly accessible databases for four distinct components of the environmental impact of foods: land requirements; water consumption; nitrogen use (referred to as “eutrophication”); and greenhouse gas emissions. The DIEM measure refines these scores, aggregates them for individual foods to create a composite measure, and then aggregates the weighted scores of contributing foods to establish a measure for a full dietary pattern. The tool was developed with the input of world-leading environmental scientists over a span of roughly three years.

Diet ID's evidence-based nutrition well-being toolkit has already set a new benchmark in dietary measurement and management with its three core modules: a cutting-edge dietary assessment tool, goal-setting capabilities to improve diet quality, and a behavior modification module for interactive habit change and tracking. Now, with the addition of DIEM, the platform extends its capabilities by measuring and scoring the environmental impact of dietary patterns. This allows Diet ID partners to access two meaningful scores in their populations: diet quality and environmental impact. These scores serve as a baseline, with the platform providing personalized educational resources to help users improve both, ultimately benefiting both personal and planetary health.

The proprietary methodology behind DIEM is patent-pending, and a peer-reviewed article detailing the science behind the scoring system is currently in development.

“DIEM changes the game,” says Dr. David Katz, CEO of Diet ID and Chief Medical Officer at Tangelo. “The environmental consequences of our food choices are profound and often overlooked. DIEM provides a powerful way to quantify and visualize that impact, empowering individuals and organizations to make informed decisions across a full expanse of dietary options to benefit both personal health and the environment.”

DIEM's applications span across multiple sectors. Healthcare providers and insurance companies can utilize DIEM to promote sustainable diets while improving patient health. Corporations can leverage DIEM to enhance their sustainability efforts by offering dietary guidance that aligns with environmental goals. Moreover, DIEM is positioned to influence public health campaigns and food policy, reinforcing the dual importance of nutrition and environmental stewardship.

Jeremy Cooley, CEO and Founder of Tangelo, noted, “By adding DIEM to our Food as Medicine platform, we continue to establish our approach to measuring diet quality and prescribing food as the standard of care. For the first time, we're offering both the ability to understand the impact of your diet on your health, and now on the health of our planet! This is a major achievement in empowering more people with food and education that can change not only their lives, but the communities and environment around them.”

Diet ID continues to lead the field in innovative, evidence-based tools that help people make healthier food choices. The introduction of DIEM marks a critical step in addressing the environmental footprint of diets at scale. With DIEM, Diet ID partners can now evaluate the environmental impact of their population's dietary patterns while continuing to focus on health outcomes, ultimately positioning diet as a pivotal tool in promoting environmental sustainability.

About Diet ID
Diet ID is a leader in digital diet assessment and behavior change, offering innovative tools to measure diet quality and provide personalized nutrition guidance. Through a patented diet quality assessment and a suite of behavior change solutions, Diet ID empowers individuals, businesses, and healthcare providers to improve dietary outcomes and overall health.

About Tangelo
Tangelo is a full-stack Food as Medicine platform that delivers precision Food As Medicine interventions and wrap-around services to populations at scale. Focused on building the data infrastructure (or “railroad”) to make prescribing food a standard of care, Tangelo plugs-in stakeholders — including health care payers, food suppliers, nutrition experts, policymakers, and more — to a new supply-chain focused on healing our country through nutrition and ending diet-related chronic disease.

Rachna Govani
Diet ID
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