ABSTRACT
Objectives: Individual-level food consumption data remains as the ideal source for national nutrition policy-makers to identify nutrient gaps among vulnerable groups to inform appropriate interventions. Collection of such data is resource and time consuming. The Ethiopian Household Consumption and Expenditure Survey (HCES) could be an alternative source for this information with minimum marginal cost. However, data comparability between the individual-level and the household-level remains uncertain. We hypothesized that data from the HCES would be comparable with individual-level Ethiopian National Food Consumption Survey (NFCS) data with regards to average adult female consumption of wheat flour, oil, and salt. Methods: The nationally and regionally representative HCES (July 2010 to July 2011) cluster survey included 27,844 households. The NFCS (June-September 2011) was conducted on a randomly selected subset of HCES clusters, and included 8,267 women between 15-45 years of age. Data were weighted for relative population sizes. We used the adult-female-equivalent of household fraction to convert household-level HCES data to average adult-female daily consumption of wheat flour, oil, and salt to compare with the NFCS average individual-level 24- hour dietary recall data. Differences between mean gram consumption of wheat flour, oil, and salt were assessed with a paired t-test. Results: No significant differences in average adult female consumption of wheat flour, oil, and salt were found between the two surveys. Conclusions: Findings from this initial analysis suggest that the HCES based estimates can be used to estimate average adult female consumption of wheat flour, oil, and salt.