Achieving healthy, sustainable, and equitable diets is one of the challenges for 21st-century food systems. The definition of Healthy and Sustainable Diets (HSDs) was presented for the first time in a plenary session of the Symposium “Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets: United Against Hunger” organized, jointly by FAO and Bioversity International, in Rome in November 2010 as follows: “Sustainable Diets are those diets with low environmental impacts which contribute to food and nutrition security and to healthy life for present and future generations. Sustainable diets are protective and respectful of biodiversity and ecosystems, culturally acceptable, accessible, economically fair and affordable; nutritionally adequate, safe and healthy, while optimizing natural and human resources.” (FAO, 2012). Then, the landmark EAT - Lancet report (2019), that represents a very impactful paper on the scientific community and policy-making system, set global scientific targets for healthy diets and sustainable food production, and integrated these universal scientific targets into a common framework. However, this report did not focus on how to bring about this shift.

Dating back, the first step of studies on HSDs refers to Pedro Escudero (1934) who presented a healthy diet as one that is qualitatively complete, quantitatively sufficient, harmonious in its composition and adequate for its purpose and the individual. Gussow and Clancy (1986) described for the first time the term sustainable diet or sustainable nutrition as a diet made up of foods that are not only healthy, but that also contribute to the sustainability of the entire nutrition system. World Health Organization (WHO) in 2004 in the Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health (DPAS) adds to the nutritional quality of food consumed the requirements related to food production and processing. More recently, HSDs have been conceived as dietary patterns that promote all dimensions of individuals’ health and wellbeing but at the same time have low environmental pressure and impact, are accessible, affordable, safe and equitable, and are culturally acceptable (FAO and WHO 2019).