European nutrition and health report 2004

The European Nutrition and Health Report, funded by the European Commission, is the first report combining health and nutrition data from European countries. Thirteen countries of the European Union and Norway expressed their interest in participating in this project. These countries of the EU are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Hungary which was included in the very last minute replacing Ireland. Thus it is the first and only new member state of the EU included in a project which was designed to cover the European Union before May 2004. The Institute of Nutritional Sciences of the University of Vienna (Austria) acted as coordinating centre of this project under the supervision of Prof. Ibrahim Elmadfa. The main task of the participating countries was the collection of national data. These data were then forwarded to the coordinating centre. Where necessary, the data set was transferred into another format by the coordinating centre, which was responsible for the preparation of the final report. The main goals of this report were: the compilation of available food and nutrient intake and health data; the identification of major nutrition and health problems in the participating countries and the EU regions; the identification of inadequacies of data collected in the participating countries, which would make a comparability of the collected data difficult. This report should not only compile data from the participating European countries, but should be an impulse for future projects in the area of nutrition and health monitoring. It should serve as a basis for improvements and for the planning of such future projects. Further, it shows what still has to be done in order to obtain comparable and representative dat