Traditional diets that have developed across different regions of the world over thousands of years may offer valuable insights into disease prevention and improving human health. However, as they are increasingly replaced by Western-style, industrialised dietary patterns, the knowledge they contain is at risk of being lost.

With this in mind, researchers from 12 countries have launched the “World Diet Initiative”, a global initiative that seeks to record and analyse traditional eating habits before they disappear. The initiative is presented in an article published in the journal “Nature Medicine.”

For thousands of years, communities around the world have developed unique dietary patterns adapted to their natural environments and local traditions. The Maasai communities in East Africa, for example, follow a diet rich in animal products such as milk, meat and animal blood. In Ethiopia, plant-based foods such as legumes, vegetables and grains are dominant. Indian cuisine is characterised by the extensive use of spices, while Pacific island communities traditionally consume fish, taro roots and coconut.

These diets have evolved over many generations, shaped by locally available foods and traditional preparation methods. In several communities that continue to follow these dietary patterns, chronic conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases have historically appeared at lower rates.

The World Diet Initiative consists of two main pillars:

The first is the World Diet Atlas, an openly accessible digital database that will map traditional diets around the world, documenting foods, their origins, preparation methods and consumption practices.

The second is the World Diet Programme, which will investigate the biological effects of these diets using common research methods, allowing results to be compared across different populations.

Recent research by some of the initiative’s scientists in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania found that men who replaced their traditional local diet — rich in legumes, whole grains and fermented foods — with a processed Western-style diet experienced increased inflammation and other biological changes linked to chronic diseases within just two weeks.

In contrast, participants who abandoned the Western-style diet and returned to their traditional diet, or consumed a traditional fermented drink made from millet and bananas, showed changes in the opposite direction, with reduced markers of inflammation.

The initiative will operate as a global consortium, with local research institutions playing the leading role and maintaining ownership of their data, while findings will be responsibly shared with the international scientific community.