A major new resource that provides one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of what people are eating around the world has been introduced in a new study by an ECI researcher.
From obesity and heart disease to climate change and food affordability, many of today's biggest challenges are shaped by what we eat. But there is a surprisingly basic problem facing researchers and policymakers: we often don't know with enough accuracy what people are actually consuming.
The new study, published in Nature Food and authored by Professor Marco Springmann, from the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford and also UCL Institute for Global Health introduces the Global Dietary Database for Impact Assessments (GDD-IA), which is freely available through an interactive online dashboard, allowing users to investigate dietary patterns across countries and over time.
The GDD-IA combines information on food production, food waste, dietary surveys and human energy requirements to estimate what people eat across the period from 1990 to 2020. It includes detail by age, sex and whether people live in urban or rural areas.
The resource has been designed to support research into some of the world's most pressing questions: How do diets affect human health? What impact do they have on climate change and the environment? How affordable are healthy and sustainable diets for different populations?
Dr Springmann said:
Many of the decisions we make about food policy rely on assumptions about what people eat. But existing global datasets often have important limitations. Our aim was to create a more complete and biologically realistic picture of food consumption that can support better assessments of health, environmental and economic impacts.”
Why measuring diets is so difficult
Estimating what people eat may sound straightforward, but existing approaches each have drawbacks. National food supply statistics can overestimate consumption because they do not fully account for food waste. Dietary surveys provide valuable detail but can underestimate intake because people forget, misreport or under-report what they have eaten.
The new database combines the strengths of both approaches while addressing key weaknesses. By integrating multiple sources of evidence, the researchers created a dataset designed specifically for large-scale impact assessments.
Supporting better decisions on food systems
To demonstrate its value, the study used the database to assess the health, environmental and economic impacts of diets.
It found that different methods of estimating food intake can lead to substantially different conclusions about diet-related disease burdens, environmental pressures and food costs. This highlights how important accurate dietary data is for informing public policy and research.
The database will support future studies ranging from nutrition and public health to food security, environmental sustainability and the affordability of healthy diets.
An interactive online data explorer has also been launched, allowing users to explore dietary patterns across countries and population groups and over time, and examine differences by age, sex and urban or rural residence.
Exploring diets around the world
As governments seek ways to improve public health while reducing environmental pressures from food systems, reliable evidence is increasingly important.
By bringing together multiple sources of dietary information into a single globally consistent resource, the GDD-IA provides researchers, policymakers and other users with a powerful new tool for understanding how diets shape both human and planetary health.
The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust. Read the study in full in Nature Food: Global dietary estimates for conducting health, environmental and economic impact assessments