SHELF: Sustainable and Healthy Lifestyles

The SHELF (Sustainable and Healthy Lifestyles) project is funded through a start package grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

This research project has strong scientific relevance, with the potential to make significant advances in assessing healthy and sustainable lifestyles. It uniquely combines Machine Learning (ML) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods with consumption data to design healthy lifestyles and develop mitigation strategies that reduce environmental footprints.

The project includes developing and applying ML techniques to systematically study the intricate relationships between multiple co-determinants and health status, analyzing the complex interactions between exposure to several foods, chemicals-in-products, behavioral activities and resulting physiological indicators. Moreover, it includes the sustainability assessment of lifestyles, for example, at the level of personal consumption, including housing, transportation patterns, energy and goods, in order to identify key determinants of sustainable lifestyles.

This project aims to assemble three key scientific fundaments into a digitalized platform for sustainable and healthy lifestyles:
- A quantitative and data-driven systems approach integrating health impacts into product-oriented environmental assessments.
- The exceptional availability of Danish health and statistical Big Dataset on health outcomes, consumption and sustainability.
- A unique combination of mass balance-based Source-to-Impact models and ML techniques able to "let the data speak" and assess interactions between multiple factors.

This will be done through the integration of data from different sources: the "Danish Diet, Cancer and Health" cohort (DCH, provided via Danish Statistics), DTU Food survey data (provided via DTU Food) and the already curated and publicly available data from the "US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey" (NHANES). On personal consumption data, sources include the Energy Label EMO database (provided via Energistyrelsen), the Municipality Building Dwelling Occupants database (provided via Lyngby Taarbaek municipality) and Household consumption (provided via Danish Statistics).

These cohorts/datasets are the foundation for creating a digitalized platform by integrating data to analyze key determinants of healthy lifestyles within planetary boundaries and design trajectories to achieve them. In doing so, this research seeks to inform precision health and sustainability, underpinning a future where individuals can make informed decisions about their lifestyles, health and the environment and, ultimately, identify synergies and trade-offs between the health and environmental dimensions of sustainability.