Indian Diet Data

Anuvaad’s efforts under the Indian Diet Data workstream have primarily focused on developing two key data resources: the Indian Diet Data Portal and the Indian Nutrient Databank. The Indian Diet Data Portal consolidates and maps existing individual dietary intake data at sub-national levels and the Indian Nutrient Databank serves as a comprehensive open-access database of nutrient values for commonly consumed Indian recipes.

Adequate dietary intake assessment is important not only to understand the associations between diet and health-related outcomes, but also for nutritional surveillance and gathering information for developing evidence-based nutrition policies and programmes. However, India continues to experience persistent gaps in nationally representative data on the dietary intake of the population.

Diet data, if compiled systematically and updated periodically, could inform evidence-based policies and programmes. With this objective, the Indian ‘Diet Data’ portal was created on Anuvaad’s website with inspiration from the FAO/GIFT website.

A systematic search of research studies that collected diet data on the Indian population at the subnational level was conducted, and a total of 76 studies were identified. The diet data portal also includes visualisation of the nutrient data collected from these studies for 18 macro- and micronutrients created using the Tableau visualisation tool.

The Indian Diet Data Portal on Anuvaad’s website can be accessed here.

Indian Nutrient Databank (INDB)

Food composition databases are essential tools for assessing diets, as they enable users to convert consumed foods into nutrient intake estimates. This process is critical for evaluating the nutritional quality of diets and determining how closely they align with recommended dietary guidelines. Consequently, comprehensive and context-specific food composition databases are vital for advancing nutritional research and informing policy decisions.

India is known for its rich dietary diversity and heterogeneity of composite dishes. However, the nutrient composition of composite Indian dishes is limited. Additionally, a few of the existing resources lack documentation of their methodology, and the databases underlying them are not open-access.

The objective of developing the Indian Nutrient Databank (INDB) was to develop an open-access database with nutritional values of standard Indian recipes. The INDB is a unique open-access resource that can be used by researchers, the government, and the private and third sectors to derive nutrient intakes in India to better inform interventions and policies to address malnutrition.

The Indian Nutrient Databank on Anuvaad’s website can be accessed here.

Learning Network on Indian Diet Data

The Learning Network on Indian Diet Data aims to strengthen India’s diet data ecosystem by fostering collaboration, addressing gaps in diet data and leveraging data science tools for actionable insights.

To address the gap created by the absence of such critical data, Anuvaad is also building a LEARNING NETWORK ON INDIAN DIET DATA

Key objectives of this learning network :

Build consensus and harmonize the diet data ecosystem.
Develop realistic strategies to fill any gaps, through improved primary data collection.
Leverage tools of data science and modelling, to generate programmatically meaningful insights for diet-based interventions under Poshan 2.0.
Improve institutional capacity within the policy framework within the MoWCD for data-informed decision-making in the context of India’s dietary habits and patterns.

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