Food Biodiversity and its Association with Diet Quality and Health Outcomes-A Scoping Review

Food biodiversity is receiving increased attention because of global food systems being a major contributor to biodiversity loss. Food biodiversity, defined as the diversity of plants, animals, and other organisms used for food, may benefit both human and planetary health. Despite this potential, little is known about the association between food biodiversity and the healthiness of human diets. This systematic scoping review presents an overview of the nexus between food biodiversity, diet quality, health outcomes, and environmental impact. Three search strategies were performed in Scopus and PubMed Central, to identify English articles published up until December 2024 on food biodiversity in relation to diet quality, health outcomes, and environmental impact. Eight studies reported on the association between food biodiversity and diet quality, and 4 on the association between food biodiversity and health outcomes. No studies reported on the association between food biodiversity and environmental impact. The studies quantified food biodiversity using Nutritional Functional Diversity, Dietary Species Richness (DSR), Simpson Diversity Index, Shannon Diversity Index, Berger-Parker Index, or a combination of these. One study compared the latter 4 metrics by calculating Hill numbers. Despite using different metrics, all studies showed significant positive associations between food biodiversity and nutritional adequacy, a reduced risk of total and cause-specific mortality, or a reduced risk of gastrointestinal cancers. One study reported a nonsignificant association between DSR and body fat percentage. In conclusion, limited available studies consistently find a positive association between food biodiversity, diet quality, and decreased health risks, highlighting the potential of food biodiversity to improve the healthiness of diets. Currently, DSR is proposed to be the most feasible metric to quantify food biodiversity. Future studies should focus on the added value of food biodiversity over dietary diversity in relation to human and planetary health, which is currently unclear.