2022 Articles

The need for nuance with dietary data

Fanzo, Jessica C.

What people eat, why people make certain food choices, who has choices, how these food choices influence dietary patterns, and how these patterns impact health outcomes are still largely unknown. There are various reasons why the nutrition community has been navigating within a dietary black box. Some factors include the limited comprehensiveness, temporal coverage, use of dietary recall, expense, representativeness, disaggregation, comparability, and standardization of collecting individual dietary data. Filling these knowledge gaps is critical because the types of suboptimal dietary patterns consumed worldwide now pose significant risk factors for morbidity and mortality. Understanding what people consume, the nutritional adequacy and quality of that consumption, and its ramifications on dietary quality and nutrition outcomes is critical to construct evidence-based policy recommendations to improve diets.