Current Aims and Next Steps | Global Dietary Database

Current Aims

GDD and related work has spanned over a decade, during which remarkable data have been collected and important insights have been gained. Our current work builds upon these strong foundations to develop and expand the impact of GDD. Current GDD work aims to fulfill three main target areas:

To estimate individual food and nutrient intakes worldwide by country, year, age across the lifespan, sex, education level, urban or rural residence, and pregnancy/nursing status.
To use generated estimates to understand disease burdens, identify high-impact interventions, and evaluate and improve public health and nutrition policies.
To create a public resource and dissemination platform for sharing intake estimates with all stakeholders in the global nutrition community.
To harmonize and publicly disseminate individual-level dietary data (24hr recall and food records) at their finest level.

Next Steps

We are currently finalizing our user-friendly online platform. This platform will be accessible to multiple stakeholders, including scientists, funders, NGOs, and country-based decision-makers seeking dietary information at national and subnational levels.

We have finalized and released the latest iteration of GDD survey datasets, which includes both previous and newly acquired diet datasets from the most recent round of data collection. Part of this dataset of surveys include those harmonized at the individual-food, individual-person level. Some of these harmonized datasets have been incorporated in the GDD model.

Finally, we will continue the development of strategic partnerships and the sharing of complementary expertise with organizations around the world. Such partnerships will enable parties to expand international networks, establish a framework for reciprocal work and research review, enable the co-hosting/co-dissemination of each other's datasets, and strengthen the expertise and potential methods for future collaborative research.

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