Assessment of Nutritional Risk Representations in Publicly Available Data in Saudi Arabia: A Triangulated Scoping...

Background: Saudi Arabia maintains official statistics on its food security, in addition to conducting surveys on health parameters and performing national health assessments. Also, several academic papers on dietary patterns are published every year. Many published documents analyze data on food availability, self-reported eating habits, and biomarker-based health risks. However, individually, they represent distinct aspects of nutrition. Hence, this study was undertaken to examine publicly accessible nutrition-related evidence in Saudi Arabia and assess whether existing public food and nutrition datasets consistently align with the biological indicators of nutritional risk. Methods: Searches were conducted using defined criteria in publicly available Saudi and international sources published or updated between 2005 and 2025. These were identified through official reports, global food databases, WHO-aligned surveys, and peer-reviewed articles, with searches conducted and updated during June-July 2026. Sources were classified by representativeness, recency, measurement validity, accessibility, and analytical role. The primary outcome was the completeness and interpretability of public evidence streams rather than a pooled prevalence estimate. Results: SHIS 2013 remains the top public national dietary intake dataset, which shows that only 5.2% and 7.5% of people met their fruit and vegetable intake recommendations, respectively. GASTAT Health Determinants Statistics 2024 indicated that only 10.2% of people aged 15 years and above ate five or more portions of fruits and vegetables daily, yet GASTAT Food Security Statistics 2024 indicated significant per capita availability of rice, milk, poultry, eggs, red meat, onions, tomatoes, and dates. High levels of biological risk were evident in WHS 2019 biomarkers; for example, 42.6% of people had hypercholesterolemia and 50% had low hemoglobin according to the WHS 2019 indicator definition. Recent studies provided additional data on beverages, sugars, dietary habits of adolescents, and diet quality but lacked national food-wide intake data. Conclusions: Public Saudi nutrition data provide complementary but non-equivalent information; indicators show low dietary adequacy and high biomarker-defined risk, supporting the need for integrated individual-level nutrition surveillance. In the future, Saudi national nutrition surveillance must focus on individual-level intake data and biomarker-based measurements.