Report of the technical consultation on measuring healthy diets: concepts, methods and metrics

Overview

Food systems and diets are changing everywhere and monitoring the healthfulness of diets at global and national levels is becoming increasingly important. Better measurement and monitoring are needed to support governments in establishing policies and programmes to promote healthy diets and assess the effectiveness of these actions.

There are critical gaps in global, regional, and national monitoring of characteristics and trends in diets. Currently, there are no harmonized metrics for tracking how diets around the world are evolving and the impact of these changes on human health and the environment.

In order to promote increased communication, coordination, and collaboration to accelerate progress toward identifying or developing a parsimonious set of metrics for global monitoring of healthy diets, a technical consultation was organized by the WHO-UNICEF Technical Expert Advisory Group on Nutrition Monitoring (TEAM) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), with technical and logistical support from USAID Advancing Nutrition. Eighty-five expert participants representing a wide range of institutions, geographic areas, and roles in the data value chain, engaged in the consultation from 18–20 May 2021.

This report provides a summary of the consultation presentations, working group contributions, discussions and recommendations. The report highlights three overarching topics addressed during the consultation:

1. overview of global diet monitoring and prioritization of metric criteria and characteristics;
2. methods, tools and metrics to measure diets; and
3. definition and prioritization of next steps for identifying a global metric for monitoring of healthy diets.