High-income countries dietary trajectories diverge from the global nutrition transition

Abstract Countries with rising incomes typically undergo a nutrition transition, marked by increasing consumption of animal-sourced foods and declining intakes of cereals and other plant-based products. However, large-scale, data-driven assessments of how diets worldwide align with this transition remain scarce. Here, we analyse dietary regimes in 188 countries, from 1970 to 2021, covering 370 food products, and identify a nutrition transition occurring at the global scale. On average, every tenfold increase in a country’s per capita gross domestic product corresponds to a 13% rise in the dietary share of calories supplied by animal products and to a 15% decline in the share supplied by cereals. Nonetheless, in several high-income countries, such as Canada, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the UK, the dietary composition diverges from global trends, exhibiting declining caloric shares from animal-sourced foods alongside rising contributions from cereals and plant-based products.