Objectives
To estimate the global supply and dietary sources for micronutrients important for maintaining health and protecting against disease, by country, age, and sex.
Methods
By combining FAO food balance sheets, food production and trade data, we estimated the edible food supply by country per capita over the past 50 years. Additional data from Tufts Universityâs Global Dietary Database â based on 24-hour recall and other individual level survey data â were used to estimate the varying consumption of foods across age and sex groups for 2010. Food supplies were then paired with regionally appropriate food composition tables to estimate dietary nutrient supplies. Model results were validated against a detailed and long-running USDA nutrient supply dataset.
Results
The resulting Global Expanded Nutrient Supply (GENuS) dataset provides estimates of 23 nutrient supplies sourced from 225 foods for 152 countries (95.5% of world). Moreover, these are further disaggregated across 34 age-sex groups spanning the entire population. Validation results show a good correlation with the more detailed USDA dataset across nearly all nutrients.
Conclusions
Our group has completed the first step in assessing the quantity and sources of micronutrient supplies globally, which is the basis for many of our ongoing studies to identify nutritionally vulnerable populations driven by environmental changes: fisheries declines, micronutrient loss in crops caused by increasing CO2 levels, and dietary shifts resulting from pollinator loss. Next steps include the assimilation of improved datasets (24-hour individual recall and household level surveys, national food composition tables) to bolster our model by improving the fidelity and precision of our estimates.
