Dietary assessment is essential to determine nutrient intake gaps in the diet and associated food intakes. Information derived from dietary intake surveys is needed to inform the design of appropriate nutrition interventions, and to evaluate those interventions.
The goal of this study was to develop and test two methods of quantitative dietary assessment that are less technically challenging and less expensive to implement than the standard 24HR dietary recall procedure, but still capable of identifying nutrient gaps with acceptable precision.
The main research activities were to:
- design methods to collect necessary input data (food listing, usual portion sizes, usual recipes) needed to implement the survey tools and convert food intakes into nutrients;
- implement field surveys to compare the two test methods with a standard reference method (full 24HR recall approach), and;
- compare the results of the test survey methods to those of the standard 24HR recall reference method, focusing on four key outcomes.
The findings of this study indicate that a well-designed SQ-FFQ survey may be a viable option for quantitative dietary intake assessment where the objectives are suited to support the design of food-based nutrition interventions.