GODAN commits to open data for the nutrition agenda

GODAN took part in the NNedPro 3rd International Summit on Medical Nutrition Education and Research, in Cambridge on 1-2 August 2017.

The spirit of the Summit was to contribute to bridge the gap between medical nutrition and agriculture nutrition, taking a look at nutrition from the value chain perspective.

The Summit was open to researchers, health professionals teaching in academia or clinical practice with a nutrition remit, including Cambridge-based and international leading nutrition experts from around the world. 

The event encouraged participants to consider a diversity of perspectives on nutrition data, with GODAN’s Ruthie Musker (Research and Partnerships) presenting ideas on Producing an open data nutrition strategy.  Additionally discussions were held on the constraints and solutions to releasing nutrition research data for public policy purposes.

GODAN’s participation in the NNedPro summit for the second year in a row signaled an active commitment to increase open data in nutrition. We will be announcing key advancements in our nutrition agenda in the coming months.  

Challenges of using open data for positive nutrition outcomes

• Linking data
• Ethical considerations: ethical approval needs to be tracked as well as future studies (make sure that the future studies adhere to the ethics standards of the past study), make sure that original people who study was done on give consent for each consecutive study? (NOTE: Ethics seemed to be the largest concern)
• Where to put the data? which repositories? 
• How to integrate production (Agriculture) related data relevant to nutrition
• Other sectors having an impact on nutrition but without being sufficiently factored in the holistic nutrition horizon dialogue/data exchange: Examples are transport, storage, taxation, trade policies, all of which do have an impact on public nutrition but often times are not part of the equation.
• How to make incentives for researchers to publish data openly (ex: building up a dataset, someone uses it and succeeds, this is not desirable) - citations for datasets? 
• Anonymization is resource intensive - what is the most resource efficient way to manage this? Confidentiality and deanonymization is a economy of scale (higher critical mass --> higher output)
• Standards and Metadata → What standards would we use?
• Do data entry standards exist for the nutrition area or research?
• What metadata must be included? - the real value is the metadata (investment in metadata)
• Guidelines on what to request from others (standards)
• Explore how nutrition fits in with the food system 

You can learn more about the Summit through the Twitter hashtag #NNedPro

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