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Tomato retailers at a market in the Morogoro region of Tanzania tell Hellen Samwel (center), an enumerator with AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center, about the post-harvest losses they experience.
Photo Credit: Srinivasulu Rajendran/Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center

Every country and even regions within countries have unique diets, making it challenging to understand how shifting diet patterns in different regions of a country may be impacting nutrition.  We know that assessing and monitoring positive and negative characteristics of diets is key to understanding the causes of poor health and nutrition outcomes. Identifying current diet patterns can help improve nutrition, especially in low- and middle-income countries where diets are rapidly changing due to urbanization, globalization, migration, and other factors. Measuring dietary patterns is an important first step that can inform nutrition programming and potentially both nutrition-sensitive agriculture policy and related interventions.