Dear all,
I would like to inform you about the recent developments here in FAO and with our partners such as EFSA or WHO on food classification and description.
As many of you might remember, there have always been discussions in the food composition and food consumption community on the most appropriate food classification and description systems – with the understanding that this topic is more
important for food consumption than in food composition.
The good news is that EFSA (European Food Safety Authority) has developed under the leadership of Francesco VERNAZZA a comprehensive food classification and description system called FoodEx2. You can find it at
https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/data/data-standardisation.
Under the leadership of Catherine Leclercq, FAO and WHO are developing the FAO/WHO Global Individual Food consumption data Tool (FAO/WHO GIFT) with the aim to collect, harmonize and disseminate individual food consumption data available
at national and sub-national level all over the world through an FAO hosted web-platform (see http://www.fao.org/nutrition/assessment/food-consumption-database/en/) . It will soon be publicly available through
http://www.fao.org/gift-individual-food-consumption/en/. FAO/WHO GIFT is using FoodEx2 to classify and describe the reported foods. They have worked closely with Francesco VERNAZZA from EFSA
to include missing foods from developing countries into new releases of FoodEx2.
As food matching between food composition and food consumption data has always been a challenge, FAO/INFOODS published the FAO/INFOODS Guidelines for Food Matching (see
http://www.fao.org/infoods/infoods/standards-guidelines/en/) and one additional forward into more harmonization would be that as many food consumption surveys and food composition tables
and databases (FCT/FCDB) would classify and describe their foods in addition to their national system also with FoodEx2.
We in FAO will use FoodEx2 in the updated version of the West African Food Composition Table and for our upcoming Global Phytate Database.
I would therefore like to suggest that all new published
FCT/FCDB should consider coding their foods also using FoodEx2. This would tremendously assist in matching from the FCT/FCDB to other food-related databases such as food consumption data. And for sure, if you are in contact with those having food consumption
data, I would appreciate if you could suggest them to do the same.
Hoping you find this helpful. It is for sure, it will take some time to recode all foods in your databases but I am sure that the invested time is worth the effort.
Best wishes
Ruth
Ruth Charrondiere, PhD
Nutrition Officer
INFOODS coordinator
FAO
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla
00153 Roma
Italy
Telephone: +39 06 570 56 134
Fax:
+39 06 570 54593