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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 10p.

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.

Language English

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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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    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) 3 indicator defined and described in this document is a food group diversity indicator that has been shown to reflect one key dimension of diet quality: micronutrient adequacy, summarised across 11 micronutrients (Martin-P r ével et al., 2015). The indicator constitutes an important step towards filling the need for indicators for use in national and subnational assessments. Such indicators must be relatively simple to collect and suitable for large surveys.
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    This course is primarily intended for members of institutions and organizations whose (nutrition-sensitive or nutrition-specific) work has impact pathways aiming to improve dietary diversity. This course has been designed to explain how to use the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) indicator, with a view to contributing to improved diets among nutritionally vulnerable women of reproductive age.
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