The State of Diet Quality Globally: A Systematic Assessment of Worldwide Dietary Patterns Using the Global Dietary Database (P10-045-19)

Abstract

ObjectivesHealthy diet patterns are a global priority to reduce undernutrition and chronic disease. Prior work suggests that healthy and unhealthy diet patterns are distributed and changing independently across the world. Our objective was to characterize current healthy and unhealthy diet patterns by age, sex, education, residence and country using the 2015 Global Dietary Database (GDD). MethodsThe GDD 2015 evaluates dietary intake based on 1137 surveys-years of systematically identified national and subnational individual-level diet surveys worldwide from 185 countries (97.5% of the global population). Dietary intake estimates and their uncertainty were generated for 15 dietary factors using a Bayesian hierarchical model including the individual-level data, country-level food availability data, and other covariates. Two types of diet patterns were assessed: one reflecting greater intake of 11 healthy dietary items; and the other, lower intake of 4 unhealthy dietary items. Mean intake of each dietary factor was divided into quintiles. Quintiles were assigned an ordinal score and scores were summed to generate each pattern, scaled from 0–100. Higher scores correspond to healthier diets for each age-sex-country-year-education-residence stratum. ResultsIn 2015, the global mean score was 48 [95% UI: 39–58] for the healthy diet pattern (Fig 1) and 51 [32–69] for the unhealthy diet pattern (Fig 2). Healthy vs unhealthy diet pattern scores across the 41,040 global strata annually were not strongly interrelated (r < -0.4). Western (54 [45–63]) and Latin American (63 [53–72]) regions had highest scores for the healthy diet pattern but lowest for the unhealthy diet pattern (37 [19, 54]; 27 [13, 42], respectively). Asia (57 [40–76]) and Sub-Saharan Africa (57 [34–76]) had the highest unhealthy diet pattern scores but lowest healthy diet pattern scores (42 [33, 52]; 41 [30, 53], respectively). Healthy diet pattern scores were generally higher in urban areas and among more educated strata, while unhealthy diet pattern scores were higher in rural areas and in less educated strata. ConclusionsThese novel data provide quantitative estimates of the specific heterogeneity in diet patterns across the world, providing the best estimates to date to inform policies and priorities for reducing the health and economic burdens of poor diet quality. Funding SourcesGates Foundation. Supporting Tables, Images and/or Graphs▪▪