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Mixed dishes consumed away from home or from communal plates: Standard recipe and portion approaches for MDD-W data collection

An annex to Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women – An updated guide for measurement: from collection to action









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    Book (stand-alone)
    FAO/Intake joint meeting report on Dietary Data Collection, Analysis and Use
    Taking Stock of Country Experiences and Promising Practices in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    2020
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    Dietary data provide critical information to guide the design of evidence-based nutrition and agriculture policies and programmes. Such information is especially crucial in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In addition to having the highest levels of undernutrition globally, these countries are now also seeing dramatic changes in dietary patterns, with diets shifting increasingly away from a “traditional diet”, towards a diet more heavily influenced by processed, packaged and energy-dense foods with little nutrient content. As a method for collecting data on what people eat, nationally representative, quantitative 24-hour dietary recall surveys are considered the gold standard, but they are expensive, time-consuming and require specialized technical expertise to carry out. Thus, despite the clear need for dietary data in LMICs, the number of such countries with nationwide dietary data available to guide the design of policies and programmes remains relatively low. This report provides a summary and highlights from a technical meeting on “Dietary Data Collection, Analysis and Use: Taking Stock of Country Experiences and Promising Practices in Low- and Middle-Income Countries”, jointly convened by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Intake Center for Dietary Assessment, on December 11–13, 2019 at FAO headquarters in Rome, Italy. The meeting, which brought together experts from 20 LMICs across different regions of the world, aimed overall to promote South–South learning, cross-regional networking, and the sharing of experiences with national (or large-scale), government-led, government-owned, quantitative 24-hour dietary recall surveys in LMICs.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    Minimum dietary diversity for women
    An updated guide to measurement - from collection to action
    2021
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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) 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.
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    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.

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