Diet Compositions
When we think about malnutrition, we often focus on hunger and undernourishment – that is, having enough calories to eat. That is the first basic marker of nutrition.
But what we eat matters a lot for our health too. It’s not just about energy intake, but how our diets supply sufficient protein, fats, and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals). Someone can be malnourished despite getting enough to eat if they don’t have a diverse diet.
Poor and monotonous diets can often lead to micronutrient deficiencies.
Our food choices also matter for our environmental impact. How we ensure everyone in the world has access to an affordable, nutritious diet while reducing the environmental impact of farming is one of our most pressing problems.
On this page, you find our data and visualizations on diet compositions.
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Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. When citing this topic page, please also cite the underlying data sources. This topic page can be cited as:
Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Diet Compositions” Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://ourworldindata.org/diet-compositions' [Online Resource]
BibTeX citation
@article{owid-diet-compositions,
author = {Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado and Max Roser},
title = {Diet Compositions},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2023},
note = {https://ourworldindata.org/diet-compositions}
}
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