GLOBAL DIET QUALITY SCORE SOCIAL MEDIA & ADVOCACY TOOLKIT Presented by FHI Solutions and Intake – Center for Dietary Assessment

Context for Action | The Social Media & Advocacy Toolkit | About the GDQS | Key Messages | Social Media Assets

This Social Media & Advocacy Toolkit is for anyone who has a passion and interest in being part of positive change in the fields of nutrition, health, environmental policy and women’s rights. The Toolkit can be used by spokespeople, influencers and advocates in conversations across social media and as a means to encourage action within policy spheres. It is the social supplement to The Global Diet Quality Score (GDQS) Toolkit, which explains the unique opportunities that the GDQS provides to instigate policy change.

It also introduces the Intake4Earth app and the Sustainable Healthy Diet Metric, to be released in late 2023, which together provide new methods for measuring the environmental impacts of diets.

CONTEXT FOR ACTION

Our world is at a turning point and advocates across the globe are calling for radical change. Today, diet quality is an increasing global concern in the context of the burgeoning food crisis, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, the rising cost of living and significant hikes in food prices. We all need to speak up for equity and for our planet.

Understanding what people are eating is a non-negotiable in protecting people and the planet. Diet quality, and the measurement of diet quality, matter more than ever, because data are intrinsically linked to so many of our national and global systems – health, food, and the responsible stewardship of natural resources.

Put simply, if we fail to measure diet quality, we fail to respond fully and dutifully to the food system and to the climate crisis.

To date, both the lack of dietary data required to assess food consumption at the population level and the need for globally appropriate metrics to measure diet quality and the environmental sustainability of diets, have hindered our knowledge on diet quality. The absence of data slows innovations towards healthier, sustainable diets that exist within planetary boundaries. Women and girls continue to be the hardest hit in times of economic crisis and their health and nutrition is in jeopardy.

We lack quality and up-to-date data to understand what people are eating and on how diets are changing for individuals throughout the course of their lives and across generations. Broader consumer-based population level trends, including the consumption of healthy and unhealthy foods can’t be understood without dietary data. The lack of routine population-level data on nutritional outcomes, such as micronutrient deficiencies and anemia, and on specific foods and food groups consumed, is inhibiting the better design of policies and regulations.

The Global Diet Quality Score (GDQS) is the first metric validated for global use to capture diet quality (1,2). It aims to fill gaps in dietary data collection and help us understand what people eat to spark positive change.

Designed alongside the GDQS, the Intake4Earth app will be released later this year. It allows countries to use real time data to report on the environmental impacts of diets by tracking five indicators of planetary health: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, eutrophication potential, water use, and biodiversity loss. Once released, the Intake4Earth app will provide a suite of environmental metrics for global use to inform a range of policies, investments, and actions to help meet climate targets.

SOCIAL MEDIA & ADVOCACY TOOLKIT

ABOUT THE GLOBAL DIET QUALITY SCORE (GDQS)

Data on what people are eating is a fundamental guide towards positive change. Yet today we are short on data and, until recently, we have also lacked a clear metric and easy-to-use data collection method.

The Global Diet Quality Score (GDQS) is designed to reflect overall diet quality in response to the urgent need to understand what people eat to assess, monitor, and evaluate progress towards achieving healthy diets.

The GDQS is an entirely food-based metric consisting of 25 food groups: 16 healthy food groups, seven unhealthy food groups, and two food groups (red meat, high-fat dairy) that are unhealthy when consumed in excessive amounts. The scoring method includes categorical information about the quantities of healthy and unhealthy food groups consumed, which is critical to obtaining a better understanding of whether a diet poses risks for nutrient inadequacy or non-communicable diseases. The metric is tabulated based on the quantity of consumption reported as consumed for each food group during a 24-hour reference period.

Diets everywhere are changing rapidly with the increased consumption of highly processed, energy-dense foods. As such, the GDQS offers policy makers, program designers, researchers, and others a method to understand what people eat.

Intake4Earth app: An invitation to collect data on the environmental impacts of diets

Understanding people’s diets can help us protect biodiversity and ensure greater sustainability in food supply chains.

With anticipated release in 2023, the Intake4Earth app is a separate and novel app developed by Intake in conjunction with the GDQS app. The Intake4Earth app allows countries to use real-time data to report on the environmental impacts of diets by tracking five indicators of planetary health: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, eutrophication potential, water use, and biodiversity loss. In addition, the Intake4Earth app allows for automatic tabulation of the GDQS and the Sustainable Healthy Diet metric. The Sustainable Healthy Diet Metric is a new metric for global use recently developed by Intake, which has been designed to measure progress towards achieving diets that are both healthy and score low on overall environmental impacts.

The Intake4Earth app requires a longer respondent interview time than the GDQS app. The collection of 24-hour dietary recall data is linked on the back end to environmental impact data to allow for the automatic reporting of environmental metrics related to planetary boundaries.

Shifting our diets, globally, towards health and sustainability requires responsible actions from businesses. The Intake4Earth app offers a unique, scalable tool for social impact investors looking to make sustainable change.

The Intake4Earth app will be available for use by early adopters in late 2023. We encourage supporters and advocates to sensitize governments and investors on the role the Intake4Earth app has in enabling responsible climate policy. Data on the environmental impacts of diets provides an essential a tool for assessing progress towards meeting climate targets.

KEY MESSAGES

Are we measuring what matters?

"Without good data, we’re flying blind. If you can’t see it, you can’t solve it." – Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations

• Healthy diets have the potential to save one in five lives each year (3). We call for a data revolution for a nourished world.
• Poor diets are estimated to be responsible for one quarter (26%) of all avoidable deaths among adults (4).
• Are we measuring what matters? Can we make global health a reality if we don’t know what people are eating?
• Optimal nutrition for all people helps them reach the brightest versions of themselves. “The first wealth is health,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American essayist.
• Data on what people are eating is a fundamental guide towards positive change. Yet, today we are short on that data and, until recently, we have been short on a clear, easy-to-use data collection method.
• All people, everywhere, have an innate right to optimal nutrition and health.

The GDQS is a cornerstone for responsible policymaking across sectors.

• Considering volatile and rising food prices, near real time dietary data allows decision makers to see which sub-groups are being impacted and how consumption patterns are changing, enabling swift and targeted action.
• The GDQS is the first metric, validated for global use, and designed to reflect overall diet quality.
• The GDQS has been designed in response to the urgent need to understand what people eat to assess, monitor, and evaluate progress towards achieving healthy diets.
• The GDQS app automatically tabulates results and does not require any post-fieldwork data entry, reducing the time required between data collection and results.

The GDQS can support the right to optimal health and nutrition for women and girls.

• Diet quality is a matter of equity - we still live in a world where women and girls are eating last and less. Join our Action Agenda for a Nourished World.
• “Gender equality and the empowerment of women is a fundamental human right, which mutually enforces the right to adequate food,” The Emergency Nutrition Network.
• Malnutrition is the single largest cause of death among women, globally, killing more women than any other risk factor, including alcohol and tobacco (5).
• The GDQS app can help facilitate positive policy change by allowing for easy data collection on diet quality for women and girls, who are being disproportionately affected.
• Women and girls are the hardest hit from the economic crisis and changes to our global food system (6).
• It is estimated that an additional 4.8 million women globally will suffer from anemia due to the multi-faceted consequences brought about by COVID-19 (Standing Together for Nutrition, 2021).
• If we fail to reach women and girls, we fail to reach everyone. Yet, we cannot reach them and improve nutrition without better data on diets.
• Over one billion women experience at least one form of malnutrition (7).

The GDQS can support positive change for COVID-19 economic recovery, the cost of living crisis, and global disruptions to food supply chains.

• We are in a global cost of living crisis. Data on diets are essential if we are to support people, incentivize business growth, and meet the growing health demands of populations.
• The GDQS can be used to strengthen or develop policies, programmes, and innovations to advance food systems, gender equity, and economic, health, and/or social protection policies.
• Data on diet quality can progress innovations, policies, and projects in relation to improving nutrition and reducing risk to non-communicable diseases.

The GDQS can assist in establishing responsible business pratice.

• Routine collection of dietary data can assist governments in regulating the food system, for example reducing subsidies on unhealthy foods and taxation on high sugar products.
• Through greater awareness of what types of food people are consuming, governments and civil societies are better able to hold businesses accountable.

To meet climate targets, we need to collect data on the environmental impacts of diets.

• The Intake4Earth app - to be released in 2023 by Intake - is the first of its kind to assess the impact of diets on planetary boundaries across five important metrics.
• Real time data on the environmental cost of diets is a must. The Intake4Earth app measures the impact of diets on greenhouse gas emissions, land use, eutrophication potential, water use, and biodiversity loss.
• The food system is one of the biggest contributors to climate change – producing over a third of all GHCs.
• We all have a responsibility to eat in ways that respect the planet – be an advocate for the Intake4Earth app and demand the change we want to see.

SOCIAL MEDIA ASSETS

The below section has turnkey social media messages and graphics to use on any platform but is primarily geared towards Twitter. In an effort to spread this conversation far and wide across multiple stakeholder audiences, we included both primary and secondary hashtags and social handles to engage broader sectors.