Compare methods

	Weighed Food Record	Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	2016
Originator	Sheila A. Bingham and colleagues (validation in nutritional epidemiology)	FAO & FANTA III (Martin-Prevel, Arimond, Ballard, Deitchler, Kennedy and colleagues)
Type	Prospective weighed-intake record pipeline for reference dietary assessment	Dichotomous food-group-count indicator for women's diet quality
Seminal source	Bingham, S. A., Gill, C., Welch, A., Day, K., Cassidy, A., Khaw, K. T., Sneyd, M. J., Key, T. J., Roe, L., & Day, N. E. (1994). Comparison of dietary assessment methods in nutritional epidemiology: weighed records v. 24 h recalls, food-frequency questionnaires and estimated-diet records. British Journal of Nutrition, 72(4), 619-643.	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.
Aliases	WFR, Weighed Dietary Record, Weighed Food Diary, Weighed Intake Record	MDD-W, Minimum Dietary Diversity Women, Women's Dietary Diversity Score, MDD-W indicator
Related	4	4
Summary	The Weighed Food Record (WFR) is a prospective dietary assessment method in which the respondent weighs and records every food and beverage at the moment of consumption, weighing back any leftovers, to obtain a precise quantitative measure of intake. Because it removes the portion-size guesswork that limits recalls and food-frequency questionnaires, it is widely regarded as the reference or gold-standard method against which other dietary instruments are validated. Sheila Bingham and colleagues' classic studies in the British Journal of Nutrition compared weighed records with recalls and questionnaires and, using the 24-hour urinary nitrogen biomarker, demonstrated that weighed records most closely track an objective measure of protein intake. The cost is high respondent burden and the risk that the act of weighing changes what people eat.	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.