Retail prices, environmental footprints, and nutritional profiles of commonly sold retail food items in 181 countries.

Background: Transitions toward healthier, more environmentally sustainable diets would require large shifts in consumption patterns. Cost and affordability can be barriers to consuming healthy, sustainable diets.

Objectives: To our knowledge, this study provides the first worldwide test of how retail food prices relate to empirically estimated environmental footprints and nutritional profile scores between and within food groups.

The Healthy Diet Basket is a valid global standard that highlights lack of access to healthy and sustainable diets.

The Healthy Diet Basket (HDB) is a standard developed from food-based dietary guidelines (FBDG) for the measurement of the Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet-a new indicator of food security tracked by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank. Here we analysed the HDB's economic, nutritional and environmental characteristics of least-cost diets relative to 16 national FBDG and the EAT-Lancet reference diet. The HDB cost averaged US$3.

Global analysis reveals persistent shortfalls and regional differences in availability of foods needed for health.

Sufficient food is available in the world for all people to consume sufficient calories, but not healthy diets. This study traces historical and projected changes in global food systems toward alignment with the new Healthy Diet Basket (HDB) used by UN agencies and the World Bank to monitor the cost and affordability of healthy diets worldwide. Using the HDB as a standard to measure adequacy of national, regional and global supply-demand balances, we find substantial but inconsistent progress toward closer alignment with dietary guidelines, with large global shortfalls in fruits, vegetables, and legumes, nuts, and seeds, and large disparities among regions in use of animal source foods.

Measuring food access using least-cost diets: Results for global monitoring and targeting of interventions to improve food security, nutrition and health.

Benchmark diets using the most affordable locally available items to meet health and nutrition needs have long been used to guide food choice and nutrition assistance. This paper describes the result of recent innovations scaling up the use of such least-cost diets by UN agencies, the World Bank, and national governments for a different purpose, which is monitoring food environments and targeting systemic interventions to improve a population's access to sufficient food for an active and healthy life. Measuring food access using least-cost diets allows a clearer understanding of where poor diets are caused by unavailability or high prices for even the lowest-cost healthy foods, insufficient income or other resources to acquire those foods, or the use of other foods instead due to reasons such as time use and meal preparation costs, or cultural factors such as taste and aspirations.

Trade policy reform, retail food prices and access to healthy diets worldwide.

Recent use of least-cost diets as a measure of global food security revealed that over 3 billion people are unable to afford sufficient nutritious food for an active and healthy life, driving demand for policy changes to improve access and affordability. This study quantifies the role of imports in consumer prices, matching retail prices in 144 countries to imports by origin of the item or its main ingredient, resulting in a total of 13,846 pairs of a retail price and its import cost in 2017. We find that 55% of retail items had some active imports supplementing domestic production, and of those around 48% have nonzero tariffs whose average effective rate is around 6.

Peak timing of slowest growth velocity among young children coincides with highest ambient temperatures in Burkina Faso: a longitudinal study.

Background: Seasonal cycles in climatic factors affect drivers of child growth and contribute to seasonal fluctuations in undernutrition. Current growth seasonality models are limited by categorical definitions of seasons that rely on assumptions about their timing and fail to consider their magnitude.

Objective: We disentangle the relationship between climatic factors and growth indicators, using harmonic regression to determine how child growth is related to peaks in temperature, precipitation, and vegetation.

COVID-19 mobility restrictions and stay-at-home behaviour in 2020 were associated with higher retail food prices worldwide.

COVID-19 policy responses have included mobility restrictions, and many people have chosen to stay at home to avoid exposure. These actions have ambiguous impacts on food prices, lowering demand for food away from home and perishables, while increasing supply costs for items where workers are most affected by the pandemic. We use evidence from 160 countries to identify the net direction and magnitude of association between countries' real cost of all food and mobility restriction stringency.

Beyond the Food Systems Summit: Linking Recommendations to Action-The True Cost of Food.

A transformation of food systems is needed to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals specified in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Recognizing the true costs and benefits of food production and consumption can help guide public policy decisions to effectively transform food systems in support of sustainable healthy diets. A new, expanded framework is presented that allows the quantification of costs and benefits in three domains: health, environmental, and social.

Retail prices of nutritious food rose more in countries with higher COVID-19 case counts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has curtailed lives and livelihoods, leading to price spikes for some foods and declines for others. We compare monthly retail food prices in up to 181 countries from January 2019 to June 2021, test for differences over time and find that average prices rose significantly, especially for more nutritious food groups in countries with higher COVID-19 case counts. Analysis of retail prices by food group complements data on farm commodity prices and overall consumer price indexes, helping to guide policy for resilience and response to shocks.

Sibling rivalry between twins in utero and childhood: Evidence from birthweight and survival of 95 919 twin pairs in 72 low- and middle-income countries.

Background: This study explores the magnitude and timing of sex and gender disparities in child development by describing differences in health outcomes for male and female siblings, comparing twins to control for all aspects of life circumstances other than sex and gender.

Methods: We construct a repeat cross-sectional dataset of 191 838 twins among 1.7 million births recorded in 214 nationally representative household surveys for 72 countries between 1990 and 2016.

Tracing global flows of bioactive compounds from farm to fork in Nutrient Balance Sheets can help guide intervention towards healthier food supplies.

Adequate supplies of healthy foods available in each country are a necessary but not sufficient condition for adequate intake by each individual. This study provides complete Nutrient Balance Sheets that account for all plant-based and animal-sourced food flows from farm production through trade to non-food uses and waste in 173 countries from 1961 to 2018. We track 36 bioactive compounds in all farm commodities recorded by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, accounting for nutrient-specific losses in processing and cooking as well as bioavailability.

Linear Growth Spurts are Preceded by Higher Weight Gain Velocity and Followed by Weight Slowdowns Among Rural Children in Burkina Faso: A Longitudinal Study.

Background: The temporal relationship between length (linear) and weight (ponderal) growth in early life is important to support optimal nutrition program design. Studies based on measures of attained size have established that wasting often precedes stunting, but such studies do not capture responsiveness of growth to previous compared with current conditions. As a result, the temporality of linear and ponderal growth relationships remain unclear.

Global variation in the cost of a nutrient-adequate diet by population group: an observational study.

Background: Nutrient deficiencies limit human development and could be caused by the high cost of locally available foods needed to meet nutrient requirements. We aimed to identify the populations whose nutrient needs are most difficult to meet with existing global food systems.

Methods: In this observational study, we used the International Comparison Program 2017 collection of global food prices to measure cost per day and cost per calorie of meeting nutrient needs, based on least-cost diets within upper and lower bounds for energy and 20 nutrients for healthy populations across 20 demographic groups in 172 countries.

Monthly measurement of child lengths between 6 and 27 months of age in Burkina Faso reveals both chronic and episodic growth faltering.

Background: Linear growth faltering is determined primarily by attained heights in infancy, but available data consist mainly of cross-sectional heights at each age.

Objectives: This study used longitudinal data to test whether faltering occurs episodically in a few months of very low growth, which could potentially be prevented by timely intervention, or is a chronic condition with slower growth in every month of infancy and early childhood.

Methods: Using anthropometric data collected monthly between August 2014 and December 2016, we investigated individual growth curves of 5039 children ages 6-27 mo in Burkina Faso (108,580 observations).

Sustainable food systems and nutrition in the 21st century: a report from the 22nd annual Harvard Nutrition Obesity Symposium.

Food systems are at the center of a brewing storm consisting of a rapidly changing climate, rising hunger and malnutrition, and significant social inequities. At the same time, there are vast opportunities to ensure that food systems produce healthy and safe food in equitable ways that promote environmental sustainability, especially if the world can come together at the UN Food Systems Summit in late 2021 and make strong and binding commitments toward food system transformation. The NIH-funded Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Harvard and the Harvard Medical School Division of Nutrition held their 22nd annual Harvard Nutrition Obesity Symposium entitled "Global Food Systems and Sustainable Nutrition in the 21st Century" in June 2021.

Assessing Diet Quality Where Families Share Their Meals: Evidence from Malawi.

Background: Where families eat together from a common dish, the shared meal must be nutrient dense enough in each nutrient to meet the needs of the highest-need member.

Objectives: This study aimed to develop an aggregate household nutrient requirement benchmark that satisfies all members' needs in a context in which meals are shared and to illustrate how that metric could inform food and nutrition policy making.

Methods: We merged nationally representative survey data for Malawi in 2010, 2013, and 2016-2017 with individual nutrient requirements and local food composition data to compute the adequacy of each household's aggregate consumption given its demographic composition and primary occupation.

Modelling the potential cost-effectiveness of food-based programs to reduce malnutrition.

Poor quality diets contribute to malnutrition globally, but evidence is weak on the cost-effectiveness of food-based interventions that shift diets. This study assessed 11 candidate interventions developed through Delphi techniques to improve diets in India, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. A Markov simulation model incorporated time, individual-level, nutrition, and policy parameters to estimate health impacts and cost-effectiveness for reducing stunting, anaemia, diarrhea, and mortality in preschool children.

Beyond price and income: Preferences and food values in peri-urban Viet Nam.

Sub-optimal diets are one of the most important risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease. Developing a better understanding of the drivers of food choice, including the role of individual preferences, is important to address this issue. The objective of this mixed methods research was to identify the relative importance of preferences for different food quality attributes (e.

Food Systems as Drivers of Optimal Nutrition and Health: Complexities and Opportunities for Research and Implementation.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are intricately linked to food systems. Addressing challenges in food systems is key to meeting the SDGs in Africa and South Asia, where undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies persist, alongside increased nutrition transition, overweight and obesity, and related chronic diseases. Suboptimal diets are a key risk factor for mortality and 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet; in addition, food systems are not prioritizing environmental sustainability.

Global dietary convergence from 1970 to 2010, despite inequality in agriculture, leaves undernutrition concentrated in a few countries.

Humans globally have similar nutritional needs but face large differences in natural resource endowments and local food production. This study quantifies food system inequality across countries based on natural resource inputs, food/nutrient outputs, and nutrition/health outcomes, from 1970 to 2010. Animal source foods and overweight/obesity show rapid convergence while availability of selected micronutrients demonstrate slower convergence.