Diets are not monitored towards global nutrition-related targets either, despite clear commitments to “ensure access by all people to safe, nutritious and sufficient food” explicit in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2. Current SDG 2 indicators, which capture undernourishment (that is, insufficient dietary energy supply at a national level), food insecurity, and nutritional status of children and women, do little to provide insights into the population-level consumption of healthy diets.
For example, in 2017 and 2018, the prevalence of undernourishment estimates for Tajikistan and Nigeria were relatively similar (11.6% and 10.4%, respectively) (Table 1). However, minimum diet diversity for women (MDD-W), collected in the same years through the Demographic and Health Surveys, revealed that although 80% of women of reproductive age were reaching MDD-W in Tajikistan, only 56% of women achieved MDD-W in Nigeria. The corresponding prevalence of minimum dietary diversity for children (MDD-C) was 22.5% in Tajikistan in the same year and 31.1% in Nigeria (2021). That is, with the same national availability of dietary energy, women in Tajikistan were achieving far better dietary diversity than women in Nigeria. At the same time, less than a third of children in both countries were achieving MDD-C, but the prevalence was higher in Nigeria than in Tajikistan 4 .
Table 1 Comparison of country-level prevalence estimates for selected SDG 2 food security and nutrition indicators to MDD-W and MDD-C
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