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Guidelines for measuring household and individual dietary diversity










Please note: A recent development has led to a new dietary diversity indicator, the Minimum Dietary Diversity-Women (MDD-W), to replace the Women’s Dietary Diversity Score (WDDS). However, the procedures for the assessment of Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) remain unchanged. New standalone guidelines for both the MDD-W and the HDDS are being developed and will be available soon from http://www.fao.org/food/nutr ition-assessment/en/. It is recommended to follow the new procedures and guidelines for assessing dietary diversity in any future studies.

Obtaining detailed data on household food access or individual dietary intake can be time consuming and expensive, and requires a high level of technical skill both in data collection and analysis. Dietary diversity is a qualitative measure of food consumption that reflects household access to a variety of foods, and is also a proxy for nut rient adequacy of the diet of individuals. The dietary diversity questionnaire represents a rapid, user-friendly and easily administered low-cost assessment tool. Scoring and analysis of the information collected with the questionnaire is straightforward. The dietary diversity scores described in these guidelines consist of a simple count of food groups that a household or an individual has consumed over the preceding 24 hours. The guidelines describe the use of the dietary diversity quest ionnaire at both the household and individual level, for which calculation of the score is slightly different in each case. The data collected can also be analyzed to provide information on specific food groups of interest. The household dietary diversity score (HDDS) is meant to reflect, in a snapshot form, the economic ability of a household to access a variety of foods. Studies have shown that an increase in dietary diversity is associated with socio-economic status and household food s ecurity (household energy availability) (Hoddinot and Yohannes, 2002; Hatloy et al., 2000).



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    To make informed policy decisions ensuring food and nutrition security for all, it is crucial to have access to relevant dietary information Beyond information on country and household level food availability, data on individual quantitative food consumption ( is crucial to assess the nutritional adequacy of the population’s diet For this purpose, FAO and the World Health Organization ( have developed a global database on IQFC data under a joint initiative, the FAO/WHO global individual food consumption data tool (FAO/WHO GIFT) The platform is intended to support evidence based policymaking by providing harmonized information on food consumption As of yet, this tool is underutilized by governments given its limited dissemination scope and lack of harmonization of country datasets The project was designed to enable national institutes from Kenya, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Nigeria and the Philippines to collect and harmonize their IQFC data and support informed decision making to improve national nutrition policies These four countries were chosen given their recent or planned IQFC surveys and the interest from governmental partners The project provided capacity building trainings to data managers in dietary data collection and harmonization in order to share the most recent data on the FAO/WHO GIFT platform In addition, it encouraged government counterparts to leverage these harmonized datasets to develop food based dietary guidelines FBDGs).

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