Interview with Director of the FAO Food and Nutrition Division, Lynnette Neufeld

You joined FAO in February 2022 with an impressive expertise in nutrition issues. How do you see the role of ESN in delivering on FAO’s Strategic Framework?
FAO has a long trajectory of contributions to nutrition and specifically to knowledge, data and evidence related to healthy diets, but the world is not on track to meet nutrition targets.
As the Food and Agriculture Organization, there is so much more that can be done. While all forms of malnutrition have many causes, unhealthy diets are a common cause of them all. Nutritious food must become more available, affordable, convenient and desirable. Perhaps the role of FAO seems straight forward, but FAO nutrition experts have a key role to play in supporting countries to achieve this. There is an abundance of misinformation out there about healthy diets – as experts, we need to keep FAO grounded in the most up-to-date evidence. There are also complexities to reaching those whose diets are most vulnerable, and there will inevitably be trade-offs in seeking to meet objectives related to nutrition and health, the environment, livelihoods and other outcomes. Our role in the FAO Food and Nutrition Division is to know the evidence and help create and use the tools to realize that potential, and help assess and balance these trade-offs from a nutrition perspective. We are here to help all units in FAO be explicit, purposeful, and evidence-based in actions to achieve better nutrition.

Over the years, FAO has worked with the EU on various nutrition-related topics. What thematic areas will shape this collaboration in the coming years?
Three things come to mind. First many countries in the EU are already leaders in taking action to improve food systems for nutrition, health and the environment. Some concrete examples include food loss and waste, and a variety of sustainable production initiatives. FAO should support this work where appropriate, but also ensure that evidence is generated to capture good practice and interpret it for potential applications to other contexts. Second, this same model can apply as new areas of action are implemented across the EU, such as front of pack labelling. Finally, the EU is not immune to important diet-related nutrition issues, but data on nutritional status and dietary intake at national level are scarce for many countries in Europe, leaving important gaps to ensure data and evidence-informed policy making. FAO could play an important role to support these efforts with good practice guidance where appropriate.

You were elected President of the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS) and took office at the 22nd International Congress of Nutrition in Tokyo – Congratulations! How will this new role help you in your daily work in FAO?
IUNS is a professional network of national nutrition societies in more than 80 countries around the world, as well as affiliated member organizations working in the field of nutrition. The biggest advantage of this activity for my work at FAO is the vast network of nutrition researchers and other professionals that it links me with. It is also an excellent opportunity to ensure that the research, data and evidence priorities that FAO has identified are shared with researchers and other stakeholders in a position to address them.

The Healthy Diets Monitoring Initiative is commissioned and managed jointly by FAO, UNICEF, and WHO. Could you please tell us a bit about this interesting work and about any other activities of ESN that our readers should know about?
The Healthy Diets Monitoring Initiative (HDMI) was brought together by the three UN agencies to reach consensus on what constitutes a healthy diet, and how to measure it for a variety of policy-relevant purposes. There are a variety of healthy dietary patterns consumed in different places around the world. Many factors including access, affordability, cultural, traditional, and other motivations influence the specific foods and combinations of foods that are consumed. Underlying that variability in actual foods consumed, however, there is a set of core constructs about what constitutes “healthy” that are universal. These include things like energy and nutrient adequacy, and moderation in the consumption of foods, nutrients and other components that are harmful to health, among others. The HDMI is working to clearly articulate these, and advance the development and validation of tools that will permit their measurement across contexts for a variety of purposes. This is critically important work because the data that is needed for various purposes (e.g. for track progress towards global targets, for policymaking and program planning at national and sub-national level, etc.) varies considerably. Working with nutrition and data experts will substantially advance this field and bring consensus that can facilitate decision-making.

There are many other interesting initiatives on-going in the FAO Food and Nutrition Division. To name a few: In the next month or so we will launch a new guidance document for the development of food-based dietary guidelines that includes considerations of the environmental impact of food; Jointly with the FAO Statistics Office in the next few months we will also launch the Food and Diet Domain on FAOSTAT. Finally, we recently joined forces with the US State Department and other partners on their initiative Resilient Crops for Nutrition in Africa.

We will share additional information about these exciting initiatives in the near future.