FAO launches new food and statistics portal featuring nutrient information beyond calories

08 Feb 2024 --- A new online portal by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) — part of the FAOSTAT website — features harmonized food and nutrient statistics on the availability, consumption and dietary intake of food, energy and 17 key nutrients. The site includes data for food availability in 186 countries since 2010.

“Diets are the link between food systems and many nutrition and health outcomes. Robust statistics on food and nutrient availability, and household and individual level food and nutrient consumption are needed to help understand the local situation to be able to develop policies and programs that enable healthy diets for all,” says FAO food and nutrition director Lynnette Neufeld.

“The new domain responds to a critical need to improve the availability of data to inform the transformation of agri-food systems toward one that produces the nutritious and healthy food needed to achieve healthy diets for all,” adds Jose Rosero Moncayo, FAO chief statistician and director of the statistics division.

“To achieve this, we needed to harmonize food and nutrient statistics that are publicly available, as highlighted during the Committee on World Food Security’s High-Level Panel of Experts in 2023.”The new portal represents the first centralized location for statistics on dietary-related data, and the organization plans to continue expanding the current dataset.

Availability and intake
The online service offers four subdomains, made possible through the collaboration between FAO’s food and nutrition, statistics and fisheries and aquaculture divisions. 

The availability data is based on supply utilization accounts and presents statistics on food, energy and nutrient supply for 186 countries since 2010. 

While a similar portal offering information on energy, protein and fat availability existed prior, the new addition features figures on carbohydrates, fiber, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, phosphorous, potassium, thiamin, riboflavin, vitamin C, vitamin A, as well as several nutrients found in aquatic food that are important for human health. 

The apparent intake domain presently highlights food and nutrient consumption data in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific.

The third domain features information collected in five nationally representative individual quantitative dietary intake surveys conducted in Brazil, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico and Tunisia.

The final domain presents statistics on the consumption of various food groups based on the minimum dietary diversity for women based on individual qualitative dietary surveys conducted in Brazil, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Tunisia and Uganda.

Significance
The organization highlights the importance of the newly released portal by pointing to the link between worldwide food systems and nutrition and health outcomes. For this reason, the service is primarily aimed at policymakers and strives to ensure that the varying aspects of the global food system work together to enable healthy diets and prevent food insecurity and malnutrition. 

Ensuring data accessibility on food and nutrient availability and intake is essential to ensuring the relevant stakeholders understand the diverse forms of malnutrition and how they differ and diverge worldwide and to guide food policy. 

The contrasting issues in nutrition between rich nations and others, as well as between different geographical regions, were similarly highlighted in FAO’s 2023 Food Systems Countdown to 2030 Initiative end-of-year report.

The new portal is already highlighting new patterns, for example, that the global supply of energy and nutrients increased between 2010 and 2021. However, this trend did differ depending on the nutrient. 

Globally, the availability of fat and riboflavin (vitamin B2) increased the most, followed by dietary fiber and calcium. Meanwhile, the availability of carbohydrates and thiamin (vitamin B1) increased the least. 

By Milana Nikolova