Global Diet Quality Project

Most countries, at all levels of development, experience multiple forms of malnutrition (wasting, stunting, underweight, nutrient-deficiencies, overweight, obesity) and diet-related non-communicable diseases which are impacting human and planetary health and undermining their economies. The number of people who cannot afford a healthy diet is growing, up to 3.1 billion people in 2020. Improvement of diet could potentially prevent one in every five deaths globally. Unhealthy and unsustainable diets cost globally an estimated $3.5 trillion per year.

However, despite diet’s outsized role in terms of health and climate, we still lack an established monitoring of internationally comparable credible and robust data on what people eat to track trends, changes and patterns in diet quality and support effective, inclusive, evidence-informed, decision making to shift towards healthier diets. Tools and data need to be free-to-access public goods, lowcost, low-burden and quick-to-implement country-adapted “snapshots” on diets quality, in order to strengthen users’ agency and prevent inequalities in terms of data quality, availability and access.

Direct beneficiaries: National and international policy- and decision-makers (governments, UN organisations and nutrition community)

End beneficiaries: Populations in low- and lower-middle income countries, consumers all over the world

Outcome 1: Develop, test and ensure uptake as appropriate by users of the suite of indicators to measure diet quality and preliminary indicators of impact on environment and climate of diets

Outcome 2: Enable the international and national communities to use the DQQ to collect valid dietary data with minimal cost and effort

Outcome 3: Collect and analyse data to fill urgent global and national knowledge gaps on the state of diet quality to inform analysis and decisions for nutrition, health, agricultural and food systems-related policies and programmes

Outcome 4: Engage with stakeholders at national, regional and international levels to ensure long-term uptake of indicator and scaling up globally (incl. in high-income countries)

Resultados previstos:  

• Diet Quality Questionnaires adapted for at least 120 countries
• Data collected in 41 countries
• Publications, technical briefings, papers, reports published, diffused, presented
• 8 national/regional/international dissemination events and other conferences (ie. side-session Committee on World Food Security (CFS))
• 6 capacity building workshops in Africa and Asia to train national stakeholders from governments and universities

Resultados de las fases anteriores:  

• A new indicator to reflect global dietary recommendations of the WHO, reflecting dietary targets that protect health against non-communicable diseases was developed
• Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ) adapted for 105 countries
• DQ data collected in 54 countries, data available for 41 countries (10 low-income, 16 lower middle-income; in 24 first-ever national survey of diets in the total adult population)
• Website with adapted DQQ, tools, resources launched: www.globaldietquality.org
• National dissemination events in Mozambique, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, India
• Launch of the first report “Measuring what the world eats”
• Presentation of tools and indicators to many stakeholders (policy makers at national and international levels, academic, philanthropic, industry) to push forward uptake, adoption and endorsement of the methodology and generated indicators
• Data has been added to the Food Systems Dashboard and is considered in the Food Systems Countdown 2030

Project partners: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Gallup Organization Ldt.

SDC Thematic cooperation programmes: GAIN’s Making Markets Work for Food Systems Transformation, Global RECAP

Policy dialogue with Scaling-Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, FAO, Committee on World Food Security, WHO, UN Food Systems Summit Follow-Up at national and international levels, CGIAR (i.e. International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) pilot in Rwanda)

SDC’s bilateral programmes to transform food systems prevent and control non-communicable diseases

Fase 2 01.01.2023 - 31.12.2024   (Completed)