The Importance Of Dietary Assessment Methods

Introduction One of the main life style linked risk factors of a vast range of chronic diseases is the diet. Dietary assessment methods are consistent and accurate measurement to take dietary information which has become important and more useful to predict diseases and evaluate the impact of public health interference to improve diet and minimize obesity. It is complex to intake the dietary measurement, but the most convenient measurement method will depend and assess on subjective report, information collected from the patient, or objective observation, information documented by nursing, doctors or other health care providers. In subjective report, there are two possible surveys that can use open ended surveys and closed-ended surveys.

The 24HR is an interview in an in-depth manner, and it has usually required approximately 20 to 30 minutes to accomplish a single day recall. In these methods, the food preparation ways detailed, ingredients used, and brand name of products may be needed according to the research question. The advantages of the 24 hour recalls are a low respondent burden, suitable for large scale surveys, and can be administered by telephone. However, there is an inevitable limitation because all the information dependents on the memory, and others weaknesses of this method estimation of portion sizes, single observation provides a poor measure of individual intake, bias in recording “good/bad” foods.

Dietary history Dietary history assesses individual long-term dietary intake. Almost all research studies have used this method to gather diet information. Dietary history requires 3-day food diary and a list of foods often consumed. Unlike twenty-four-hour dietary recall, dietary history typically requires 90 minutes to complete. Because of that dietary history is rarely used in studies of epidemiological.

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It is designed to gather information from large numbers of individuals, and this method enables the assessment intake within a wide range of time in the past 2-3 months, 1 year or longer. Moreover, it is useful for collecting information about habitual intake of a range of foods. The food frequency questionnaires should advance specifically for each research or study group because the diet may be affected by ethnicity, culture, economic status, etc. There are many strengths of this method such as low respondent burden, suitable for large scale surveys, can be self-completed, can be posted. However, Estimation of portion sizes, possible over-reporting of ‘healthy’ foods, requires to be validated in relation to reference method are the disadvantages of food frequency