Difference in the association of food security and dietary diversity with and without imposed ten grams minimum consumption

Background: Dietary diversity measurement is one of the simple tools to assess the quality of food consumed in population-level and endorse by many international agencies. However, there is a growing concern that the current dietary diversity measures were lacking in the sensitivity due to the omission of minimum food consumed to be considered as consuming certain food groups in the calculation of dietary diversity score. The purpose of this study is to find the difference in DDS measurement between two methods by applying a 10-grams minimum intake for all food groups and the other one, without. Design: A cross-sectional studies involving 55 samples from two villages with different geographical characteristics. Methods: One village represents the agricultural area; other was fishpond/coastal area. Dietary diversity was analyzed using Individual Dietary Diversity Score (IDDS) with 9 food categorizations. Dietary diversity measurement calculated based on the food recall with consideration of 10 grams minimum of food weight consumption. Mann Whitney Test used to analyze the difference between calculation of dietary diversity score with and without minimum 10-grams. Results: There is no difference of children’s dietary diversity between agriculture and fishpond family group when the dietary diversity was omitting 10 grams minimum intake (p-value=0.184), while, using 10 grams minimums intake (p=0.024), there is a difference. Conclusions: Using 10 grams minimum had shown to strengthened the relationship between dietary diversity and adequacy. Further research is needed to find other minimum requirement in different kind of population to find differences among them.

Demand for Food Diversity in Romania

The present research work applied a food diversity measurement tool (Transformed Berry Index) on the 2011 Household Budget Surveys data. The investigation was performed on household purchased based TBI measure and on actual consumption TBI, in order to highlight the errors that one would make if one fails to take into account the production of goods by the household. There are some important differences in the food diversity of the actual food consumption in comparison to the purchased food quantities, the number of food items being higher in the case of actual consumption. However, food diversity does not seem to be influenced by the residence area (urban vs. rural) in any of the two approaches.