Compare methods

	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Children	Food Consumption Score
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2021	2008
Originator	World Health Organization & UNICEF (IYCF indicator working group)	World Food Programme, Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM)
Type	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for young-child complementary feeding	Weighted food-group frequency index of household food consumption
Seminal source	World Health Organization and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) (2021). Indicators for Assessing Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices: Definitions and Measurement Methods. WHO, Geneva. ISBN: 9789240018389	World Food Programme (2008). Food Consumption Analysis: Calculation and Use of the Food Consumption Score in Food Security Analysis. Rome: WFP Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping (VAM) Technical Guidance Sheet.
Aliases	MDD-IYCF, Minimum Dietary Diversity (IYCF), Infant and Young Child Minimum Dietary Diversity, MDD 6-23 months	FCS, WFP Food Consumption Score, Weighted Food Group Frequency Score
Related	4	3
Summary	Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD) for children is the WHO/UNICEF infant and young child feeding (IYCF) indicator measuring whether a child aged 6 to 23 months consumed foods and beverages from at least five of eight defined food groups in the previous day, used as a population proxy for the quality of complementary feeding. Defined in the WHO's 2008 IYCF indicator guidance and substantially revised in the 2021 WHO/UNICEF update, the indicator targets the window in which breast milk alone no longer meets a child's needs and complementary foods must supply increasing nutrients. The 2021 revision raised the food-group count from seven to eight by adding breast milk as its own group, correcting a bias that had penalized breastfed children, and the share of children reaching the minimum is now a core global feeding-practice statistic.	The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is the World Food Programme's standard household food-security indicator, defined in its 2008 VAM technical guidance. It is a weighted measure of dietary diversity and frequency: enumerators record how many days in the past week a household consumed each of a set of standard food groups, those frequencies are capped at seven and multiplied by weights reflecting each group's nutritional importance, and the weighted sum yields a score from zero to 112. Households are then classified as having poor, borderline, or acceptable food consumption using standard thresholds. Validated against caloric and other food-security measures by Wiesmann and colleagues at IFPRI, the FCS is widely used in emergency and development food-security assessments because it is fast, cheap, and proxies both diet quality and adequacy.