Food based dietary guidelines in Vietnam: progress and lessons learned

The food based dietary guidelines (FBDGs) is a crucial tool for nutrition education and communication in Vietnam. Together with the changes of socio-economic situation, Vietnam needs to deal with different nutritional problems including malnutrition, overweight and undiversified diets at the same time. From 1995 to the present, three versions of FBDGs have been developed and revised in a period of every 5 years. The FBDGs, Food Guide Pyramid and Food Square made a good set of nutritional education tool which were disseminated through a wide range of activities and communication channels. The evaluation of FBDGs will be carried out before its revisions to reflect eating patterns and lifestyles of consumers whom the nutritional education programs wish to reach. In developing countries like Vietnam, the socio-economic situation is changing over short period of time. Therefore, the assessment of appropriateness and implementation progress of the FBDGs is necessary and should be done after a period of every 5 or 10 years. The implementation of the FBDGs should be closely connected with the activities of the National Plan for Nutrition and should have involvement from multi-sectoral organizations. Training, monitoring and evaluation for implementation of the FBDGs are essential for the success of guiding consumers to convert advices into action. The lessons learned from previous FBDGs' implementation can be used to develop a new version of FBDGs that is more appropriate.