Australian Dietary Guidelines (ADG) food groups

The 2013 Australian Dietary Guidelines (ADG) encourage Australians to eat a wide variety of nutritious foods from the Five Food Groups every day and drink plenty of water. The five food groups are:

• Vegetables and legumes and beans
• Fruit
• Milk, yoghurt, cheese and/or alternatives
• Lean meats and alternatives (e.g. poultry, fish, eggs, tofu, nuts and seeds, and legumes and beans)
• Grain (cereal) foods.

The ADG also recommend a small amount of unsaturated fats, oils and spreads can be eaten. To meet nutrient requirements and reduce the risk of chronic disease, the ADG provides minimum recommended serves for each food group based on age and life stage. 

The ADG food groups are classified at 3 levels which include Major Food Groups, Sub-groups and the Servings Sub-groups. The major food group categories include the above groups, as well as water, unsaturated spreads and oils, and unclassified. See AUSNUT 2023 classification files for more information.

To determine how much of each food group type a person consumed, the total amount of each food type from all sources is calculated in grams. This includes:

• single foods (e.g. apple, bread)
• ingredients in mixed dishes (e.g. apple in apple pie, bread in a sandwich).

Recipes were developed by FSANZ to estimate how much of each ADG food group is included in mixed foods. More information is available on the FSANZ website.

Once the total amount of each ADG food type consumed is calculated, it is converted into serves using standard serve sizes from the ADG to give the total number of serves from each of the ADG Food Groups for each person (e.g. the number of serves of milk consumed as part of the Milk, yoghurt and cheese group and/or alternatives group).

The associated serving size can be found in the AUSNUT 2023 – Australian Dietary Guidelines classification system on the FSANZ website.

The number of serves of the ADG Five Food Groups consumed by each respondent per day are available in the microdata files for National Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (NNPAS) 2023 and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey (NATSINPAS) 2023. A comparison of reported number of serves of the ADG food groups to recommendations in the 2013 ADG for a population group of interest may be used to help assess diet quality. This data is available on request, and will become available in the DataLab later in 2025.

Data items and related output categories for this topic are available from the NNPAS Data Item List and the NATSINPAS Data Item List.