A global database of food and nutrient consumption

931 Perspectives In every region of the world, poor diet is a leading cause of both malnutrition and chronic diseases including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and specific cancers. In 2013, 38.3 million deaths occurred due to chronic diseases globally (70% of all deaths), with most of these deaths occurring in developing countries. 4 Anecdotal evidence and more formal evaluations in a limited number of countries suggest that changes in traditional eating patterns and a growing reliance on new types of foods are major drivers of these transitions. However, data on global patterns of dietary habits, as well as differences by population characteristics are not well established. An empirical assessment of dietary intakes is needed for evidence-based policy-making to address global health challenges. In most nations worldwide, assessment of dietary habits has been limited by the absence of robust data on individual dietary intakes that can be used in comparative studies. Up to now, most global analyses have evaluated only single dietary factors or have used data on crude household expenditure or national food supply estimates that do not adequately capture individuals' actual consumption levels. 5,6 Moreover, types of foods consumed and diet-related diseases are often unevenly distributed within populations and it is therefore essential to collect data on specific demographic groups to understand the impact of diets on diseases. Furthermore, even when individual dietary intakes are available, these are rarely standardized or comparable across countries or time, due to differences in the data collection instruments and their intended use, in the design and administration of surveys, and in data processing and analysis. As part of our efforts for the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases study, we systematically identified the available data from national and subnational surveys of individual-based dietary intakes of key foods and nutrients worldwide, by age, sex, country and time (1980–2010). Our preliminary methods have been reported 7 and further details are available from the corresponding author on request. Briefly, we searched multiple electronic databases and used extensive personal communications with researchers and government authorities worldwide to identify and obtain nationally representative dietary intake surveys or, if these were unavailable, large subnational surveys. For countries without identified national or subna-tional individual-level dietary surveys, we searched for individual-level surveys from large cohort studies as well as other data sources on diet such as the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Infobase, the WHO STEPS database and household expenditure surveys. For trans-unsaturated …