Sustainable and healthy dietary guidelines

This solution was shared by Wageningen University
19 December 2022

Description of the innovative solution

Poor diet diversity, inadequate nutrition intake, and food insecurity are major challenges that are aggravated with climate change. To this day, there is no clear definition of a healthy and sustainable diet. Consumers in multiple contexts are faced with daily decisions of what to eat without appropriate recommendations to meet their daily nutrition and energy requirements. Dietary guidelines at national, regional, and local levels should consider a wide range of characteristics when suggesting a healthy diet, such as consumer's income, access to food, and dietary preferences. This solution...

Poor diet diversity, inadequate nutrition intake, and food insecurity are major challenges that are aggravated with climate change. To this day, there is no clear definition of a healthy and sustainable diet. Consumers in multiple contexts are faced with daily decisions of what to eat without appropriate recommendations to meet their daily nutrition and energy requirements. Dietary guidelines at national, regional, and local levels should consider a wide range of characteristics when suggesting a healthy diet, such as consumer's income, access to food, and dietary preferences. This solution proposes to develop and measure context-specific sustainable healthy diets that consider the social/cultural, economic, environmental, and determinants of health and nutrition. This could be for instance, a comprehensive dietary guideline toolkit (recommend, implement, measure, monitor, evaluate), or sustainable healthy recipes, or classroom training materials around sustainable and healthier consumption habit. This innovation could be used as a target for nutrition programs in policy to ensure that the recommended healthy diet is accessible, available, affordable and considers the environmental and cultural lens.

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Food based dietary guidelines
Report
Ethiopia’s first dietary guidelines were published in 2022. It is anticipated that the guidelines will be revised between 2027 and 2029.
Shared by Wageningen University
Methodology for developing and evaluating food-based dietary guidelines and a Healthy Eating Index for Ethiopia: a study protocol
Scientific paper
Food-based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) are used to promote and maintain healthy eating in a population, by providing country-specific guidance. However, many African countries like Ethiopia do not have FBDGs. This paper describes the methodology for the development of Ethiopian FBDGs and for creating and evaluating a Healthy Eating Index and a scoring tool that can be used to monitor the adherence of the population to FBDGs.
Shared by Wageningen University

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