Minimum dietary diversity for women

FAO

Minimum dietary diversity for women

An updated guide to measurement - from collection to action

Year of publication 2021

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 176 p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Book (stand-alone)

ISBN 978-92-5-133993-0

Edition 1

Full item page

Synopsis (short abstract) Women of reproductive age (WRA) are often nutritionally vulnerable because of the physiological demands of pregnancy and lactation. Requirements for most nutrients are higher for pregnant and lactating women than for adult men. The Minimum Dietary Diversity for WRA (MDD-W) indicator is a food-based diversity indicator that has been shown to reflect one key dimension of diet quality: micronutrient adequacy summarized across 11 micronutrients (Martin-Prével et al., 2015). Since the launch of the MDD-W indicator in 2015, new global developments and research conducted in three countries to further determine best practices in the data collection resulted in new information and guidelines. This research was supported by capacity-development activities on the assessment of individual food consumption. This publication is an update to the 2016 FAO/FHI 360 joint publication MDD-W: A Guide to Measurement. It includes guidance on the most accurate and valid methodologies on collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data on women’s dietary diversity, for use in research, impact assessment and large-scale, health and nutrition surveys such as the Demographic Health Survey (DHS), to generate nationally representative data, that are comparable over time and across countries. In addition to supporting the regular collection of high-quality dietary data following standardized methodologies, the publication also aims to promote dialogues on and appropriate application of the data towards informing policy and programming decisions and monitoring and evaluation of nutrition outcomes and progress at global, regional, and country levels.

Cite this content as:

FAO. 2021. Minimum dietary diversity for women. Rome.

https://doi.org/10.4060/cb3434en

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Language English

Related items

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Book (stand-alone)

Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women 2016

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Women of reproductive age (WRA) are often nutritionally vulnerable because of the physiological demands of pregnancy and lactation. Requirements for most nutrients are higher for pregnant and lactating women than for adult men. The Minimum Dietary Diversity for WRA (MDD-W) 3 indicator defined and described in this document is a food group diversity indicator that has been shown to reflect one key dimension of diet quality: micronutrient adequacy, summarised across 11 micronutrients (Martin-P r ével et al., 2015). The indicator constitutes an important step towards filling the need for indicators for use in national and subnational assessments. Such indicators must be relatively simple to collect and suitable for large surveys.
Meeting

Summary Report of the Meeting to Reach Consensus on a Global Dietary Diversity Indicator for Women
Washington DC, USA, July 15th-16th, 2014
2014

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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA) convened a consensus meeting in Washington DC on July 15-16, 2014, to select a simple proxy indicator for global use in assessing the micronutrient adequacy of women’s diets. Meeting participants from academia, international research institutes, UN and donor agencies unanimously endorsed and agreed to support the use of a new indicator, called Minimum Dietary Div ersity –Women (MDD-W). The new indicator reflects consumption of at least five of ten food groups (see the table on the next page), and can be generated from surveys. It provides a new tool for assessment, target-setting, and advocacy.
Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
Integrating Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) into multitopic surveys
Simple dietary data for better nutrition
2024

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Poor diets are a leading cause of death and disease, yet a chronic lack of dietary data jeopardizes effective, evidence-based actions on nutrition. The Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) indicator is a simple, food group-based indicator that can be integrated into existing large-scale surveys with relative ease, enabling the collection of valuable data on dietary diversity. This can in turn inform policies and interventions to improve nutrition in low- and middle-income countries. As a low-cost, easy-to-collect and easy-to-interpret indicator, MDD-W has already been successfully integrated into several large-scale surveys, including the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Gallup© World Poll. Including MDD-W in more multitopic surveys will strengthen the global knowledge base on diets, and help countries monitor and achieve their nutrition goals.