We made several improvements in the process of estimating the burden of disease attributable to dietary risks. To improve the quality and coverage of our dietary estimates, we systematically searched literature for nationally or subnationally representative studies providing information on consumption of each dietary factor. We also made a systematic effort to obtain individual-level data for consumption of dietary factors; re-extracted data from all available sources; and standardised the definition of dietary factors across different sources. To capture recent trends in consumption, we used data on sales of different fresh and packaged foods to inform our estimates. To address the concerns over within-person variation in intake, we estimated usual intake of each dietary factor and used that to estimate the attributable disease burden. To make the current and optimal levels of intake more comparable, we used absolute intake of each dietary factor (rather than intake standardised to 2000 kcal per day). For more detail, see appendix 1 (p 117).
