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Integrating Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) into multitopic surveys

Simple dietary data for better nutrition

Year of publication 2024

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 10 p.

Author FAO;

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Synopsis (short abstract) 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.

This is the updated version of 2021 publications "Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) Indicator"

Language English

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    Article
    Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women: Partitioning Misclassifications by Proxy Data Collection Methods using Weighed Food Records as the Reference in Ethiopia 2024
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    Food group consumption misclassifications by proxy data collection methods were mainly attributable to females overreporting consumption because of respondent biases or the criterion for foods to be counted, rather than the suboptimal development of the food list in Ethiopia. To obtain precise and accurate MDD-W estimates at the (sub)national level, rigorous context-specific food list development, questionnaire pilot testing, and enumerator training are recommended to mitigate identified biases.
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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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    Article
    Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women: precision of national surveys and accuracy of brief data collection instruments 2025
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    Unhealthy diets are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality globally. While gradual progress has been made on collecting nationally representative quantitative dietary intake data, diets remain infrequently monitored on a large scale worldwide. In response to the financial and human resource burden and lagged data dissemination associated with quantitative dietary assessment, low-burden brief data collection instruments have been developed – which are conventionally qualitative recalls of food groups consumption. Nevertheless, there remains a lack of consensus on the measures and indicators that best capture the four priority sub-constructs of a healthy diet for monitoring purposes (i.e., diversity, nutrient adequacy, macronutrient balance, and moderation). Consequently, healthy diet indicators have been omitted in global monitoring frameworks, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Health Assembly global nutrition targets. Due to the rapid pace of changes across food systems and the associated dietary transition, however, the importance of monitoring what people eat and drink across population groups and countries has never been more critical. Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) has been identified as a promising indicator for monitoring diets globally. MDD-W questionnaires have been integrated into, amongst others, the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the Gallup World Poll (GWP).
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