165
countries covered
Micro–Macro Assessment Tool to Identify Low-impact Dietary Actions
Every diet leaves a footprint. MATILDA traces it — from plate to planet.
MATILDA links what individuals eat to national footprints and global supply chains, estimating diet-related climate, water and land impacts, dietary quality, and cost, for 70+ socio-demographic subgroups across 165 countries.
Taherzadeh, Schoorlemmer, Behrens, Bruckner & Cai · Nature Food (2026)
72
socio-demographic subgroups
3
footprints: climate · water · land
Level 1 — The individual
It starts with a plate.
MATILDA begins with what people actually eat. Dietary intakes from the Global Dietary Database cover 185 countries, stratified by age, sex, education and urban–rural residence, and are rescaled to country-, age- and sex-specific energy requirements.
Diet quality is scored with the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI), nine components, each scored 0–10, built on the foods most predictive of chronic-disease risk.
185
countries in GDD
16
food groups tracked
0–100
AHEI score
Who carries the heaviest dietary footprint?
DIETARY GHGE ACROSS 165 COUNTRIES · kgCO₂e / PERSON / DAY
Level 2 — The nation
Nations are puzzles of very different eaters.
A national footprint is not one number, it is a diverse landscape of consumer subgroups each like puzzle pieces. Using the GLOPOP-S synthetic population, MATILDA weighs each piece by how many people it represents, revealing patterns national averages hide.
Men out-emit women (median 4.36 vs 3.43 kgCO₂e d⁻¹). Emissions rise with education. Urban populations out-emit rural ones in every region.
+55%
urban total GHGE vs global avg.
+11.2%
per capita GHGE, adults 15–34
49.3%
of world population: medium education
How unequal are dietary footprints within nations?
HIGHEST ÷ LOWEST SUBGROUP FOOTPRINT WITHIN EACH NATION · RATIO (×)
How many times more the heaviest-footprint subgroup consumes than the lightest. Nigeria's near-fivefold gap dwarfs Germany's ~1.8× — and each nation's gap is consistent across climate, water and land.
Level 3 — The globe
Footprints travel along trade routes.
A meal’s impacts rarely stay where it is eaten. MATILDA models dietary footprints in the FABIO multi-regional input–output model, which maps domestic and international food flows across 187 regions. So every footprint accounts for the sourcing patterns and supply chains behind national consumption.
This is what globally and regionally averaged, food LCAs miss: the upstream, international stages of food supply chains, and the fact that production efficiency differs sharply between countries.
187
regions in FABIO
58
food product categories
3
footprints: GHG emissions · water · land (+ more to come)
Footprint distributions
DIETARY GHGE INTENSITY BY FOOD GROUP
The central relationship
Healthier diets are lighter diets.
Across subgroups, each 5% increase in AHEI, a step toward a healthier diet, is associated with measurably lower environmental pressure on all three footprints. Health and sustainability can be mutually reinforcing goals, not trade-offs.
Change in footprint per +5% AHEI
MULTILEVEL REGRESSION · HOVER FOR 95% CI
Subgroups with >70% plant-based intake keep dietary quality high at comparatively low environmental cost.
The Model
Three datasets, harmonized into one assessment tool.
MATILDA connects food consumption patterns across the 16 GDD food groups to 58 FABIO product categories, enabling country-specific footprint intensities to be scaled by real intake data, then weighted by real population structure.
72 SUBGROUPS × 165 COUNTRIES
FABIO 2018 · GLOPOP-S 2015 · GDD ≈ 2018
UNCERTAINTY: LATIN HYPERCUBE, n = 10,000
Open data
Access the MATILDA database.
Per-capita footprint estimates for all 72 subgroups in 165 countries, food-group impact intensities across national supply chains, and diet-quality scores — openly available through the MATILDA community on Zenodo.