vegetable consumption was only 54 percent of the recommended amount, fruits only 23 percent, and dairy still only 13 percent. More so, current national dietary guidelines typically address a health and nutrition target, and not a sustainability target. This is true even for national dietary guidelines among the G20 (Loken and DeClerck 2020).

An emerging body of work assesses diets against _both_ human health and planetary health objectives at the country level. The point is that a planetary health diet is likely to be different in different contexts— that the planetary health diet is not a universal benchmark. For example, meeting the planetary health diet as defined in the EAT-Lancet would imply different environmental impacts for different countries (e.g., land use, biodiversity, anti-microbial use). If GHGe are considered, a recent analysis shows that in low- and middle-income countries, agricultural GHGe would increase by 12–283 percent while globally the total GHGe would still decrease substantially (Kim et al. 2020). This is also the case for Bangladesh, and a result in this paper; instead of decreasing GHGe, meeting the planetary health diet would increase emissions. GHGe from food consumption varies across countries based partly on the country of origin of the food products (i.e., where food is imported from), because different countries would have different emissions for the same food item produced. As such, global production practices and trade policies should be considered in country-level analysis of diets. Besides the planetary health diet, there are multiple diet configurations which can work better for one country but might be less ideal for another. For example, a study calculated GHGe and water footprints for current diets and nine alternative plant-forward diets for each of 140 countries (Kim et al. 2020). The GHG footprint of a given diet varies largely by country.<sup>1</sup> This paper looks at how diets have changed in their nutritional value and their GHGe over time, and what an aspirational diet would look like for Bangladesh— one which improves nutritional value and limits environmental costs. It particularly assesses the environmental costs and nutritional value if people consumed as per the national food based dietary guidelines, or if people consumed as per the planetary health diet. This paper also assesses whether a dietary shift towards some aspirational diet is feasible given the trajectory of change in diets in the past.

# **2 Methodology and data**

This work reviewed Bangladeshi household-level consumption data in 2000 and 2016 and, based on those, modeled two benchmark diets — 1) the human health diet recommended by Dietary Guidelines for Bangladesh (FBDG) and 2) the human and planetary health diet recommended by the EAT-Lancet report (hereinafter referred to as EAT-Lancet) (Loken and DeClerck 2020). We analyzed each of the three types of diet from the aspects of average per adult male equivalent (AME) food consumption (by 7 and 10 food groups), macro- and micronutrient intake, and GHGe. Food consumption is derived from household consumption and expenditure data.

> 1 Bangladesh was not included in this cross-country study.

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