Tropical forest resources are inextricably linked to people’s well-being in terms of food security, nutrition and health in a number of fundamental ways: forests maintain cultural identities expressed in traditional knowledge; local institutions and customary practices contribute to social resilience through the diversity of healthy foods, culturally valued products integral to local food systems and food sovereignty; and products that act occasionally as a ‘safety net’ or ‘buffer’ in times of shortages (de Merode et al. 2004; Shackleton and Shackleton 2004; Arnold et al. 2011; Termote et al. 2012). Until the mid- 90s, food consumption in tropical forests was still primarily related directly to the process of food acquisition and was dominated by foraging strategies and subsistence cultivation. Nowadays, the majority of rural households in tropical regions, and a large proportion of urban households, still rely on forest products to meet part of their food, nutritional, health and livelihood needs. However, their current contribution has been poorly quantified, particularly in the rapidly growing urban centers of tropical forests. Lack of such evidence impairs biodiversity preservation strategies when setting benchmarks that include food security as a key principle. At the same time, strategies adopted to address food insecurity continue to narrow the diversity of the food supply by neglecting indigenous and traditional food systems based on wild products (Frison et al. 2011). To respond to this lack of knowledge, the inextricable link between biodiversity and nutrition security has attracted more and more interest from researchers all over the world (Johns and Eyzaguirre 2006; Burlingame et al. 2009; Kuhnlein et al. 2009;