New scientific guidelines to assess biodiverse foods in dietary surveys

A spotlight on the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition

A new publication, Guidelines on Assessing Biodiverse Foods in Dietary Intake Surveys, will assist researchers and practitioners in generating more reliable data and implementing best practices related to assessing food biodiversity.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in collaboration with Bioversity International, as one of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health's Managing Partners, has jointly produced new scientific guidelines guidelines for collecting information on food biodiversity through dietary surveys.

The publication, Guidelines on Assessing Biodiverse Foods in Dietary Intake Surveys, is meant to assist researchers and practitioners in generating more reliable data and implementing best practices related to assessing food biodiversity.

According to the authors, current foods systems are facing mounting challenges to provide growing populations with safe, diverse, and nutritionally adequate foods. This is due to resource constraints, environmental degradation, as well as the continual narrowing of the food base and the loss of biodiversity.

In order to mainstream biodiversity and improve nutrition at national and local levels, a thorough understanding of the contribution of food biodiversity to healthy diets and sustainable food systems is needed. While dietary assessment surveys provide information on the nutrient adequacy of diets, few are designed to capture the consumption of foods with taxonomical details below the level of ‘species’. This offers an opportunity to adapt these instruments to better capture this information.

These newly published guidelines can help facilitate the process of collecting better information to guide agriculture practices and programs, nutrition programs and research, and the policy spheres surrounding agriculture, nutrition, and health. The guidelines were developed through an FAO Technical Meeting on the collection of information on food biodiversity and food processing in food consumption surveys, in conjunction with the 20th International Congress on Nutrition.

Download the publication:
Guidelines on Assessing Biodiverse Foods in Dietary Intake Surveys

This article was reproduced with kind permission from the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health.  To see the original article, authored by Kimberley Keeton, visit:
http://a4nh.cgiar.org/2017/03/06/new-scientific-guidelines-to-assess-biodiverse-foods-in-dietary-surveys/

Read other news articles about the partnership between Bioversity International and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health

Photo: Food diversity fair in Zambia. Credit: Bioversity International/E. Hermanowicz