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Consensus on commitment and action to monitor healthy diets

Nature Food volume 5, pages 533–534 (2024)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 12 September 2024

Diets are not monitored towards global nutrition-related targets either, despite clear commitments to “ensure access by all people to safe, nutritious and sufficient food” explicit in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2. Current SDG 2 indicators, which capture undernourishment (that is, insufficient dietary energy supply at a national level), food insecurity, and nutritional status of children and women, do little to provide insights into the population-level consumption of healthy diets.

For example, in 2017 and 2018, the prevalence of undernourishment estimates for Tajikistan and Nigeria were relatively similar (11.6% and 10.4%, respectively) (Table 1). However, minimum diet diversity for women (MDD-W), collected in the same years through the Demographic and Health Surveys, revealed that although 80% of women of reproductive age were reaching MDD-W in Tajikistan, only 56% of women achieved MDD-W in Nigeria. The corresponding prevalence of minimum dietary diversity for children (MDD-C) was 22.5% in Tajikistan in the same year and 31.1% in Nigeria (2021). That is, with the same national availability of dietary energy, women in Tajikistan were achieving far better dietary diversity than women in Nigeria. At the same time, less than a third of children in both countries were achieving MDD-C, but the prevalence was higher in Nigeria than in Tajikistan4.

Table 1 Comparison of country-level prevalence estimates for selected SDG 2 food security and nutrition indicators to MDD-W and MDD-C
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Acknowledgements

The HDMI core group acknowledges contributions to the initiative from S. Farley (the Rockefeller Foundation) and S. Sundberg (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Funding for HDMI is gratefully acknowledged from the Rockefeller Foundation (organization, hosting and funding for the first group convening) and from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (grant no. INV-063321) for ongoing efforts. The findings and conclusions contained within are those of the authors/contributors and do not necessarily reflect positions or policies of author’s or acknowledged individual’s affiliate organizations or funders.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Rome, Italy

    Lynnette M. Neufeld

  2. University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Edward A. Frongillo

  3. Tufts University, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Boston, MA, USA

    Jennifer C. Coates

  4. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), New York, NY, USA

    Victor M. Aguayo

  5. World Health Organization (WHO), Geneva, Switzerland

    Francesco Branca

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  1. Lynnette M. Neufeld
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Correspondence to Lynnette M. Neufeld.

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Neufeld, L.M., Frongillo, E.A., Coates, J.C. et al. Consensus on commitment and action to monitor healthy diets. Nat Food 5, 533–534 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-01016-8

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