Does crop diversity contribute to dietary diversity? Evidence from integration of vegetables into maize-based farming systems

[...]Ruel [49] shows that DDS is a stronger determinant of nutrient adequacy than FVS. [...]increasing the number of food groups has a greater impact on dietary quality than increasing the number of individual foods in the diet. [...]no international consensus exists on which food groups to include in the scores [18]. [...]16 food groups (“Appendix 1” Table 5) were constructed based on local food consumption patterns [66] obtained from key informant interviews since dietary patterns vary substantially between cultures, as recommended by Ruel [49], food groupings were defined locally. [...]the propensity of expenditure on food decrease as the crop income goes up. [...]quadratic relationship is observed between the crop income and household dietary diversity; hence, it is necessary to identify the optimal level of crop income and crop diversification where increasing and crop diversification has positive impact on household dietary diversity. Since the variance inflation factor (VIF) score for all explanatory variables is more than 10 and there was no multicollinearity issues except for the squared term of crop income and Simpson’s Index (“Appendices 3 and 4” Tables 7, 8), squaring these variables may not be an empirical issue when we interpret results for these variables [60].