Food Cluster Diets

The GEMS/Food cluster diets, developed by WHO, are based on FAO Supply Utilization Account data and represent average per capita food consumption for 17 groups of countries in the world, where the amount of food available for consumption in each group of countries is divided by total population numbers (weighted to take account of individual country populations in each region). A cluster analysis approach is used, where countries with similar patterns of food consumption are grouped together, resulting in 17 cluster diets (Sy et al., 2013). The GEMS/Food cluster diets are used as a tool for assessments of chronic dietary exposure to chemicals in food but are suitable only for estimating mean dietary exposure for the general population. The cluster diets are not suitable to assess dietary exposure of specific populations like children or to estimate exposure shorter than lifetime.