Ask a government how many calories its citizens eat and you will usually get a number built on guesswork. That is the gap a new database, published in Nature Food, sets out to close.
The Global Dietary Database for Impact Assessments, or GDD-IA, comes from Professor Marco Springmann, who works at the UCL Institute for Global Health and the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. It is free to use through an interactive online explorer, and it covers 1990 to 2020. Users can break the figures down by country, by age, by sex and by whether people live in cities or villages.
Two flawed yardsticks, one fix
Researchers have long leaned on two imperfect measures. National food supply statistics tend to overstate what people eat, because they do not fully count what gets thrown away. Dietary surveys give rich detail but run low, since respondents forget meals or underreport them.
Springmann’s database blends the two. It draws on food production, food waste, survey results and estimates of human energy needs, which rest on height, body weight and physical activity. “Many of the decisions we make about food policy rely on assumptions about what people eat,” he said. “Our aim was to create a more complete and biologically realistic picture of food consumption.”
What the numbers show
The database tracks 43 food groups, reported at five-year intervals. Rich and poor countries eat differently. Higher-income populations take in far more dairy, meat, poultry, animal fats, vegetable oil and sugar, while grains, root crops and pulses carry the plate in low-income countries. Calorie intake in high-income countries runs about 10% above the world average. In low-income countries it sits 7% below.
Between 2010 and 2020 global consumption of most foods went up. Nuts and seeds climbed 28%, poultry and eggs 16%, fish and fruit 11%, and legumes and vegetable oil 10%. Sugar and red meat slipped by 3% to 5%. The fastest change came in low-income countries, where fruit and vegetable intake rose by 70% to 85% and poultry and red meat by 40% to 55%.
Why the method matters
To show the difference, the study ran the same health model on different inputs. Using the new database, estimated diet-related deaths came out about 750 thousand lower than with survey data alone, and 780 thousand higher than with food supply statistics. The study also found that the choice of method can change the conclusions about disease burden, environmental pressure and food costs.
The authors say the tool is meant for work on food security, the affordability of healthy diets, the environmental footprint of food systems and public health policy.
Sources
- What do people really eat? New global database gives best answer yet (Phys.org)
- Ученые создали базу данных потребления пищи для оценки влияния на здоровье и экономику
