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Data

Minimum dietary energy requirement

FAO
See all data and research on:
Agricultural Production

What you should know about this indicator

Item: Minimum dietary energy requirement (kcal/cap/day) Description: In a specified age/sex category, MDER is the minimum amount of dietary energy per person that is considered adequate to meet the energy needs at a minimum acceptable BMI of an individual engaged in low physical activity. If referring to an entire population, the MDER is the weighted average of the minimum energy requirements of the different age/sex groups. It is expressed as kilocalories per person per day.

Metric: Value

Source
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 14, 2024
Next expected update
March 2025
Date range
2000–2022
Unit
kilocalories per capita per day

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Food Supply by Our World in Data

Food Supply

Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado

What is undernourishment and how is it measured?

Hannah Ritchie

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The Suite of Food Security Indicators presents the core set of food security indicators.

Following the recommendation of experts gathered in the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Round Table on hunger measurement, hosted at FAO headquarters in September 2011, an initial set of indicators aiming to capture various aspects of food insecurity is presented here. The choice of the indicators has been informed by expert judgment and the availability of data with sufficient coverage to enable comparisons across regions and over time.

Many of these indicators are produced and published elsewhere by FAO and other international organizations. They are reported here in a single database with the aim of building a wide food security information system. More indicators will be added to this set as more data will become available.

Indicators are classified along the four dimensions of food security -- availability, access, utilization and stability.

Retrieved on
March 14, 2024
Retrieved from
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FS
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Food Security and Nutrition: Suite of Food Security Indicators (2023).

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Citations

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To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Minimum dietary energy requirement”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) - “Agricultural Production”. Data adapted from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minimum-requirement-calories [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Minimum dietary energy requirement – FAO” [dataset]. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Food Security and Nutrition: Suite of Food Security Indicators” [original data]. Retrieved December 15, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/minimum-requirement-calories