Nourishing the SDGs: Global Nutrition Report 2017

A better nourished world is a better world. Yet despite the significant steps the world has taken towards improving nutrition and associated health burdens over recent decades, this year’s Global Nutrition Report shows what a large-scale and universal problem nutrition is. The global community is grappling with multiple burdens of malnutrition. Our analysis shows that 88% of countries for which we have data face a serious burden of either two or three forms of malnutrition (childhood stunting, anaemia in women of reproductive age and/or overweight in adult women)

Searching for the essential: Exploring practitioners’ views on actions for re-orienting food systems towards healthy diets

To effectively accelerate action from policymakers on re-orienting food systems towards healthy diets, global stakeholders need to first determine which of the many actions under discussion are essential to delivering healthy diets. In this exploratory study, we sought to identify if there are any actions that are considered essential for re-orienting food systems towards healthy diets across a diverse range of stakeholders and sectoral and country contexts. Through engaging practitioners in scoring and ranking actions, we found a wide diversity of views across many of the proposed actions. However, a handful of actions emerged as more essential, particularly school food programmes

42 policies and actions to orient food systems towards healthier diets for all

In January 2020, the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and Johns Hopkins University began compiling recommendations made by major international reports on how to orient food systems for nutrition. This was the first step towards our ultimate goal of identifying a group of actions essential in every context to lay the foundations of a nutritious food system – the policies and programmes which any policymaker serious about improving diets and nutrition would enact at a minimum. The context was the increasing number of international processes designed to provide guidance on food systems for nutrition, including the ongoing development of the Voluntary Guidelines on Food Systems and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). As part of this process, a long-list of 42 policies and actions with the potential to orient the food system towards healthy diets was generated. Aligned with the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) report Food Systems and Nutrition, the list is made up of actions with the potential to effect change through food supply chains, food environments and consumers. Actions to change principles, governance and political processes, although critically important to frame and enable the delivery of these actions, were not the focus of the project. While the actions are focused on healthy diets, the next phase will assess how they can synergise with and support efforts to advance environmental sustainability

Metrics of sustainable diets and food systems

Policy makers and consumers are challenging the scientific community to come up with ways to measure the environmental impact of the foods we eat. This Brief describes a challenging and innovative research agenda implemented by Bioversity and its partners to describe and measure sustainable diets and food systems. The Brief builds on the early work of FAO and Bioversity in understanding sustainable diets and identifies the rich cultural history of our food and the very real concerns about access and cost is not lost in our mission to improve dietary quality for the poor with the ultimate goal of improving nutrition and health. The study of sustainable diets is as relevant to the challenges of undernutrition as it is with dietary transition and nutrition related chronic diseases and obesity

Healthy, affordable and climate-friendly diets in India

India has among the highest lost years of life from micronutrient deficiencies. We investigate what dietary shifts would eliminate protein, iron, zinc and Vitamin A deficiencies within households’ food budgets and whether these shifts would be compatible with mitigating climate change. This analysis uses the National Sample Survey (2011–12) of consumption expenditure to calculate calorie, protein and the above micronutrient intake deficiencies and relate them to diets, income and location. We show that more than two-thirds of Indians consume insufficient micronutrients, particularly iron and Vitamin A, and to a lesser extent zinc. A greater proportion of urban households than rural households are deficient at all income levels and for all nutrients, with few exceptions. Deficiencies reduce with increasing income. Using constrained optimization, we find that households could overcome these nutrient deficiencies within their food budgets by diversifying their diets, particularly towards coarse cereals, pulses, and leafy vegetables, and away from rice. These dietary changes could reduce India’s agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 25%. Current agricultural and food pricing policies may disincentivize these dietary shifts, particularly among the poor

Ecological Approaches to Human Nutrition

Objective. To describe the role that ecological knowledge plays in alleviating hidden hunger, considering human nutrition as an overlooked ecosystem service. Methods. We review existing literature and propose a framework that expands on earlier work on econutrition. We provide novel evidence from case studies conducted by the authors in western Kenya and propose a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration to alleviate hidden hunger, increase agricultural productivity, and improve environmental sustainability. Results. Our review supports the concept that an integrated approach will impact human nutrition. We provide evidence that increased functional agrobiodiversity can alleviate anemia, and interventions that contribute to environmental sustainability can have both direct and indirect effects on human health and nutritional well-being. Conclusions. Integrated and interdisciplinary approaches are critical to reaching development goals. Ecologists must begin to consider not only how their fiel

2018 Global Nutrition Report

The 2018 Global Nutrition Report shares insights into the current state of global nutrition, highlighting the unacceptably high burden of malnutrition in the world. It identifies areas where progress has been made in recent years but argues that it is too slow and too inconsistent. It puts forward five critical steps that are needed to speed up progress to end malnutrition in all its forms and argues that, if we act now, it is not too late to achieve this goal. In fact, we have an unprecedented opportunity to do so

Application of the Nutrition Functional Diversity indicator to assess food system contributions to dietary diversity and sustainable diets of Malawian households

Objective: Dietary diversity is associated with nutrient adequacy and positive health outcomes but indicators to measure diversity have focused primarily on consumption, rather than sustainable provisioning of food. The Nutritional Functional Diversity score was developed by ecologists to describe the contribution of biodiversity to sustainable diets. We have employed this tool to estimate the relative contribution of home production and market purchases in providing nutritional diversity to agricultural households in Malawi and examine how food system provisioning varies by time, space and socio-economic conditions. Design: A secondary analysis of nationally representative household consumption data to test the applicability of the Nutritional Functional Diversity score. Setting: The data were collected between 2010 and 2011 across the country of Malawi. Subjects: Households (n 11 814) from predominantly rural areas of Malawi. Results: Nutritional Functional Diversity varied demographically, geographically and temporally. Nationally, purchased foods contributed more to household nutritional diversity than home produced foods (mean score = 17·5 and 7·8, respectively). Households further from roads and population centres had lower overall diversity (P < 0·01) and accessed relatively more of their diversity from home production than households closer to market centres (P < 0·01). Nutritional diversity was lowest during the growing season when farmers plant and tend crops (P < 0·01). Conclusions: The present analysis demonstrates that the Nutritional Functional Diversity score is an effective indicator for identifying populations with low nutritional diversity and the relative roles that markets, agricultural extension and home production play in achieving nutritional diversity. This information may be used by policy makers to plan agricultural and market-based interventions that support sustainable diets and local food systems

Improving nutrition with agricultural biodiversity

This guide describes the process and procedures for collecting important information required to assess local farming systems and agrobiodiversity, household food consumption norms and the nutritional status of vulnerable groups within a given population using specific indicators. Additionally, this guide provides a framework for practical implementation of a holistic program that focuses on creating a customized intervention based on community-specific data. The manual strives to combine perspectives from the following models and approaches: 1. Farming Systems Model (FAO/WB) 2. Agroecological Model (NAFRI, FAO) 3. Indigenous Food Culture Documentation (CINE/IDRC/FAO) 4. Measuring Nutritional Functional Diversity (Columbia EI) 5. Positive Deviance Model (The Positive Deviance Initiative) 6. FANTA Nutritional Assessment Guides (USAID) 7. Food Security and Livelihoods Model (ACF International) 8. Ethnobotanical Documentation: A User’s Model (ICH/UNESCO) The development of this manual also could not have been possible without the guidance of previously published manuals by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Centre for Indigenous Peoples’ Nutrition and Environment CINE. This manual recommends a 7 phase process to approach communities of focus holistically and with a trajectory of long-term improvement