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	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Children	Individual Dietary Diversity Score
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2021	2011
Originator	World Health Organization & UNICEF (IYCF indicator working group)	Gina Kennedy, Terri Ballard & Marie Claude Dop (FAO)
Type	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for young-child complementary feeding	Qualitative 24-hour recall pipeline for individual diet-quality assessment
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	Kennedy, G., Ballard, T., & Dop, M. C. (2011). Guidelines for Measuring Household and Individual Dietary Diversity. Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome.
Aliases	MDD-IYCF, Minimum Dietary Diversity (IYCF), Infant and Young Child Minimum Dietary Diversity, MDD 6-23 months	IDDS, Individual Dietary Diversity, FAO Dietary Diversity Score, Dietary Diversity Score
Related	4	4
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 Individual Dietary Diversity Score (IDDS) is a simple, rapid count of the number of distinct food groups an individual consumed over the previous 24 hours, used as a population-level proxy for diet quality and micronutrient adequacy. Standardized in the FAO's 2011 Guidelines for Measuring Household and Individual Dietary Diversity by Kennedy, Ballard and Dop, the IDDS rests on the observation, reviewed by Ruel, that more diverse diets tend to be more nutritionally adequate. The score is obtained from a qualitative recall of everything eaten, mapping foods to a standard set of nine food groups and counting how many groups appear. Because it requires no portion weighing or food-composition tables, it is cheap to collect at scale and has become a workhorse indicator in nutrition surveys, food-security monitoring, and program evaluation.