A major new resource that provides one of the most comprehensive pictures yet of what people are eating around the world has been introduced in a new study by a UCL and University of Oxford researcher.

From obesity and heart disease to climate change and food affordability, many of today's biggest challenges are shaped by what we eat. But there is a surprisingly basic problem facing researchers and policymakers: We often don't know with enough accuracy what people are actually consuming.

The new study, published in Nature Food and authored by Professor Marco Springmann (UCL Institute for Global Health as well as the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford), introduces the Global Dietary Database for Impact Assessments (GDD-IA), which is freely available through an interactive online explorer, allowing users to investigate dietary patterns across countries and over time.

The GDD-IA combines information on food production, food waste, dietary surveys and human energy requirements to estimate what people eat from 1990 to 2020. It includes detail by age, sex and whether people live in urban or rural areas.

The resource has been designed to support research into some of the world's most pressing questions: How do diets affect human health? What impact do they have on climate change and the environment? How affordable are healthy and sustainable diets for different populations?

Professor Springmann said, "Many of the decisions we make about food policy rely on assumptions about what people eat. But existing global datasets often have important limitations. Our aim was to create a more complete and biologically realistic picture of food consumption that can support better assessments of health, environmental and economic impacts."