Compare methods

	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women	Individual Dietary Diversity Score
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2016	2011
Originator	FAO & FANTA III (Martin-Prevel, Arimond, Ballard, Deitchler, Kennedy and colleagues)	Gina Kennedy, Terri Ballard & Marie Claude Dop (FAO)
Type	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for women's diet quality	Qualitative 24-hour recall pipeline for individual diet-quality assessment
Seminal source	FAO and FHI 360 (2016). Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women: A Guide to Measurement. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and USAID's Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance III Project (FANTA), Rome.	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-W, Minimum Dietary Diversity Women, Women's Dietary Diversity Score, MDD-W indicator	IDDS, Individual Dietary Diversity, FAO Dietary Diversity Score, Dietary Diversity Score
Related	4	4
Summary	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) is a validated, dichotomous indicator of whether a woman of reproductive age consumed foods from at least five of ten defined food groups in the previous 24 hours, used as a population proxy for the micronutrient adequacy of women's diets. It was finalized in the 2016 FAO and FANTA guide A Guide to Measurement, following the consensus process documented by Martin-Prevel and colleagues that selected the ten-group list and the five-group cut-off from competing candidate indicators. Unlike the broader Individual Dietary Diversity Score, MDD-W is purpose-built for women aged 15 to 49 and yields a clean yes/no classification, making the share of women reaching the minimum a transparent, globally comparable diet-quality statistic for surveys and program monitoring.	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.