Concordance of Dietary Diversity and Moderation Among 28,787 Mother-Child Dyads in 11 Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Implications for Global Monitoring and Targeted Nutrition Actions.

Abstract

In 2025, the 'Prevalence of minimum dietary diversity' among infants and young children (IYC) aged 6-23 months and females aged 15-49 years was adopted as an additional Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger indicator. Previous studies, mainly in high-income countries, have reported that children's diets bear weak to moderate resemblance of their mothers' diets. Therefore, this study assessed i) the rank correlation between Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W) and MDD-IYC prevalence at country-level and ii) the associations and concordance of nutritious and unhealthy food group consumption among mother-child dyads using nationally representative survey data from 11 low- and middle-income countries. MDD-W was significantly higher than MDD-IYC in each survey, but the indicators nonetheless rank correlated very strongly across countries. Discordance favoured mothers for pulses, nuts and seeds; flesh foods; vitamin A-rich fruits and vegetables (F&V); other F&V; and fried and salty foods, while the opposite was observed for dairy products, eggs, and sweet drinks. Higher maternal dietary diversity was strongly associated with higher diversity in nutritious food group consumption among children in each country. Lastly, mothers consuming five or more out of 10 nutritious food groups-in other words, achieving MDD-W-best discriminated whether children achieved MDD-IYC or not. In conclusion, MDD-IYC and MDD-W data provide complementary insights for targeted and context-specific food and nutrition policies and programmes, such as behavioural change and nutrition education interventions and food environment regulations, needed to improve dietary diversity and moderation of unhealthy food groups among both IYC and females of childbearing age.