Agroundbreaking new study published in the journal Nature Food reveals that US federal dietary guidelines and other healthy diet models may carry varying levels of forced labor risk depending on the food mix. At the top of the findings: protein foods, dairy, and hand-harvested fruits drove most of the risk.
Researchers from the Friedman School at Tufts and the University of Nottingham scored more than 200 common US food items for forced labor exposure, then applied those risk scores to five diets: the Healthy US-Style Diet, Healthy Mediterranean-Style Diet, Healthy Vegetarian Diet, the 2019 EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Diet, and the current average American diet.
“We found that recommended healthy diets could have higher or lower risk of forced labor compared with what Americans currently eat, depending on the mix of foods,” says Nicole Tichenor Blackstone, associate professor at the Friedman School and senior author on the paper.
The US-Style and Mediterranean diets ranked worse than today’s average American diet in terms of forced labor vulnerability. The Mediterranean diets’s higher seafood content pushed risk upward, while dairy was the largest risk contributor in the US-Style diet. In contrast, the Vegetarian and Planetary Health diets had lower total risks, though nuts and seeds emerged as outsized drivers in those plant-based patterns.
The study highlights that protein sources—including animal, plant, and seafood—are central to forced-labor risk in food systems. In the context of livestock, the authors included risks associated with slaughtering, meat processing, and feed production. They also noted that handpicked fruits and nuts or labor-intensive fishing notably magnify the exposure.