Indicators for healthy diets from sustainable food systems

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Background

The Coalition of Action for Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems (HDSFS) brings together Member States, UN Agencies, Civil Society Organizations, Academic Institutions and Social Movements to align, mobilize and support collective action
towards the shared vision of healthy diets from sustainable food systems for all.

Actions to achieve this goal are wide-ranging and acting across food systems to influence food supply, food environments, and the valuing food. Such actions hold great potential to advance progress towards achievement of the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) such as to end hunger and malnutrition in all its forms, to promote healthy lives and wellbeing for all by substantially reducing the health burden of non-communicable diseases and improving maternal child health, reducing inequalities,
to take urgent actions to combat climate change and its impacts and enhance sustainable consumption and production. While the nature and magnitude varies, malnutrition is an issue in all countries globally and achieving healthy diets is
a necessary condition to begin to address this.

Robust indicators are essential for guiding action and to understand trends, inform decision making, measure impact, and foster accountability. The HDSFS Coalition brings together a great level of national and global level expertise in the fields
of health, nutrition and sustainability united behind the goal to enable and promote actions that will result in halving of the number of people who cannot afford a healthy diet, while working in partnership to ensure this food is produced from
sustainable food systems. In addition, the Coalition will support actions that enhance the collection and utilization of data on healthy diets for decision-making and accountability (e.g., as part of the global SDG indicator framework). Many on-going
efforts are grappling with various topics related to indicator development, and data collection, consolidation, visualization and dissemination, and use.

In this first peer-to-peer learning workshop of the HDSFS Coalition we create a space to share reflections from Member States on opportunities and challenges to the use of healthy diet data. Specifically, the objectives include:

To reflect on the concept of a healthy diet, and review the various aspects of food consumption that this encompasses, and the extent to which this does already or could reflect aspects of food systems sustainability
To learn from Member States on the opportunities and challenges for the collection and utilization of indicators of healthy diets from sustainable food systems for policy making in their contexts
Consolidate lessons from country experience that can inform on-going efforts to improve healthy diet indicators, and how this could help inform efforts in sustainable food systems
To initiate discussions and better understand the value added of the HDSFS Coalition to catalyze actions related to indicators for healthy diets from sustainable food systems

Tentative Agenda

Time	Topic	Presenter/moderator
5 min	Opening remarks: The Coalition in the context of relevant on-going efforts	Dr Francesco Branca
15 min	Capturing the essence of a healthy diet and implications for indicators and data collection systems	Professor Ed Frongillo
15 min	Country Reflections: For countries who have used diet quality/ dietary intake data to inform policy / programmatic action: How has the data been used explicitly to adjust policy? From a data perspective, how has your country captured the multiple implications of dietary patterns, considering environment, economic, and socio-cultural and well as healthy diet considerations What have been the challenges and opportunities to do this How to deal with trade-offs across health, environmental, economic, and sociocultural aspects in data systems?	4 min each from 4 member states
50 min	Moderated panel discussion From concept to implementation- opportunities and challenges for the collection and utilization of indicators of healthy diets from sustainable food systems for policy making in diverse contexts	Moderator: Dr Lynnette Neufeld Panelists: Brazil Ghana European Commission Dr Ed Frongillo Dr Anna Herforth Dr Corinna Hawkes Dr Jess Fanzo
5 min	Final reflections: What is needed? What can be done? The role of the HDSFS Coalition	Dr Brent Loken