Model & data for CDN article: Designing culturally acceptable, nutritious and low environmental impact Finnish diets with mycoprotein: a novel optimization approach

The model is designed for optimizing populational level diets with novel meat alternatives. Specifically, the model minimizes the weighted distance from the current diet (objective function), with meat alternative introduced as a new food within the meat group. We provide the R scripts and datasets to illustrate the operation of the model, the example results show the optimized Finnish diet with mycoprotein. You can easily adapt the model for your own research.

The R scripts for two models with different objective functional forms (quadratic & piecewise-linear) and scenarios:
1. "CDN_female_QPsd_NUTR_GHGE" R scirpt: quadratic form of objective function, can simulate for an average female of:
(1) Nutritionally adequate diet (“NUTR” diet) – results stored in “RESULT1_female_QP_NUTR_myco.xlsx”
(2) NUTR+GHGE-% diet (% of GHGE reduced diet, with meat fixed at NUTR diet) - results stored in “RESULT2_female_QP_NUTR+GHGE_myco.xlsx”

2. "CDN_male_LPsd_NUTR_loop_GHGE" R script: piecewise-linear form of objective function, can simulate for an average male of:
(1) Nutritionally adequate diet (“NUTR” diet) – results stored in “RESULT1_male_LP_NUTR_myco.xlsx”
(2) NUTR + [1-50%] stepwise GHGE reduced diets (with meat fixed at NUTR scenario) – results stored in “RESULT2_male_LP_NUTR+GHGEloop_myco.xlsx”

Three excel datasets are provided to run the model (the same data used in the article):
1. “INPUT_female_all_data_R_2025” for the first R script
2. “INPUT_male_all_data_R_2025” for the second R script
3. “INPUT_mycoprotein_data_R_2025” for both R scripts

The results generated in excel sheet includes: average intake (by food category and food group), cost of diets (by food category), GHGE of diets (by food category), nutrient intake of diets.

citation to the original article is recommended.