Motivation and Aims

This project aims to collect dietary quality data in the general adult population across countries worldwide, and to provide the tools for valid and feasible diet quality monitoring within countries. The project enables the collection of consistent, comparable dietary data across countries for the first time.

The Global Diet Quality project provides two main global public goods:

1. Diet Quality Questionnaire (DQQ) module that takes 5 minutes to implement, adapted for each country. The DQQ is an internationally standardized survey instrument that works universally while also capturing local realities, and can be used to interpret diet quality within and across countries. Country-adapted DQQ modules can be easily implemented and analyzed by any survey team with an interest in gathering information on diet quality. The availability of these low-burden tools is intended to facilitate and catalyze diet quality monitoring in countries, and across sectors.

2. Data on diet quality across countries. The Gallup World Poll is implementing the DQQ, starting with a first phase of 56 countries in 2021-2022. A suite of diet quality indicators will be reported, capturing dietary adequacy and dietary risk factors for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The data will enable monitoring of trends, and comparisons across different age, gender, income, and urban/rural populations. Furthermore, DHS (the Demographic and Health Surveys) is implementing selected questions of the DQQ for women, and aligned questions for infants and young children.

Team

The Global Diet Quality Project is a collaboration between Gallup, Harvard Department of Global Health and Population, and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN).

Core team members

Anna Herforth, Senior Research Associate, Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Andrew Rzepa, Partner, Gallup, Inc.

Gina Kennedy, Senior Technical Specialist, GAIN

Ty Beal, Research Advisor, Knowledge Leadership, GAIN

GAIN team: Andoni Santamaria Kampfner

Gallup team: Zacc Ritter, Kiki Papachristoforou, Zach Bikus, Taylor Auger, Pablo Diego-Rosell

Collaborators

DQQ Adaptation Team: Cecilia Gonzalez, Kristina Sokourenko, Andrea Spray Bulungu, Betül Uyar, Chris Vogliano

Independent: Terri Ballard (original core team), Doris Wiesmann (lead indicator analyst)

Wageningen University & Research: Inge Brouwer, Elise Talsma, Laura Trijsburg, Tesfaye Hailu Bekele, Duong Van, Edith Feskens

University of São Paulo: Carlos Monteiro, Euridice Martinez-Steele, Isabela Sattamini, Giovanna Andrade

Columbia University: Pamela Koch, Deborah Olarte, and Community Nutrition students

Demographic and Health Surveys: Sorrel Namaste, Rukundo Benedict

Technical Advisory Group: Lynnette Neufeld, Francesco Branca, Jennifer Coates, Megan Deitchler, Marlene Heeb, Fumiaki Imamura, Anna Lartey, Catherine Leclercq, Carlos Monteiro, Abigail Perry, Ivo Rakovac, Shelly Sundberg, Anne Swindale, Patrick Webb

Many other collaborators, including the global network of over 750 key informants who made this work possible.

Donors