Abstracto

A comprehensive review on dietary assessment methods in epidemiological research.

Waruni S. Rupasinghe WA, Harshani Perera TS, Nirmali Wickramaratne M

Dietary assessment methods play an important role in making dietary recommendations to different population in with varying health conditions and nutritional status. The main purpose of this review is to provide comprehensive information at a glance as guidance on major dietary assessment methods, their advantages, and limitations. Dietary records (food diaries), 24-hour dietary recall and food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) methods are discussed comprehensively throughout this review. According to the findings of previous studies, the estimated diet records are widely used to assess the diet than the direct measurements. Selecting an appropriate dietary assessment method depend on the group of participants and their lifestyle. Twenty-four-hour dietary recall is a valid tool to assess the average intake of the groups by applying standardized data collection methods with careful administration and with repeated assessments more than one day. The easiest administrative assessment method is the three-day food diaries although it’s having a high respondent burden. FFQ are a widely used method to estimate the specific macro and micronutrients of an individual during a specific period. However, FFQ has many limitations such as a higher respondent burden, difficulty to quantify the portion size, need of population specificity and necessity of validation. Therefore, every method has an unavoidable error which results in under-reporting, overreporting, errors in portion size estimation, inability to encounter the day to day variations in the meals and diversity of the biomarkers of the population. Hence selection of the best diet assessment method must be carefully done depending on the population’s age gender and profession.