National dietary guidelines

This dataset provides information about national strategies, action plans and policies in the field of nutrition and promotion of healthy diets. It provides an overview of information on selected indicators from the WHO Global Nutrition Policy Survey.

A comprehensive online questionnaire containing nine sections was developed by WHO to facilitate reporting against the WHO European Food and Nutrition Action Plan 2015-2020. 

 

Web-based versions of the questionnaires were circulated to 53 WHO European Member States during the second half of 2016 and the majority of responses were received before March 2017. The questionnaire was available in English, French, Russian, and Spanish, and was prefilled with existing information contained in WHO databases. An abbreviated questionnaire was developed as an offline PDF form and disseminated in January 2017 to obtain information from Member States that had not completed the full online questionnaire. The abbreviated version of the questionnaire contained 42 questions covering the top-level questions, but without the level of detail requested in the full online questionnaires. Responses from Member States were received until September 2017. A total of 49 countries responded to the questionnaire, equivalent to 92% of the WHO European region Member States. Not all countries responded to all sections of the questionnaire. The report gives priority to those indicators most relevant to our policy frameworks and for which most complete information is available. Where possible more detailed information is included, but this may be for smaller numbers of countries that had responded to the full questionnaire or for which policies, protocols, guidelines and regulations were available to the team. Where a country did not respond, it is counted as "No response". Throughout the report, no answers have been excluded from the data presentations, thus denominators may vary within the same section.

 

The data reported by Member States were validated to the fullest extent possible. The survey responses were validated against the documents submitted by Member States and against other resources, such as previous WHO publications, academic literature, partner agency databases as well as regional monitoring initiatives. After careful review, respondents were contacted to obtain any missing information or to seek clarification if necessary, with further documentation requested in certain cases. The WHO Country Offices also provided further verification of some nutrition actions implemented in Member States.

 

Data has been collected by the Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity Programme at the Division of Noncommunicable Diseases and Promoting Health through the Life course, World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe together with the Department of Nutrition for Health and Development of the World Health Organization Headquarters. Current data is available for 2017 and future data collection is foreseen.

 

Funding for the data collection and analysis was partially provided by the European Commission Directorate General for Health and Food Safety. We also acknowledge the support of funding from the Government of the Russian Federation within the context of the WHO European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (NCD Office).