Nutrition
Budget: ₹12,500 – ₹37,500 INR
Accurate measurement of dietary intake is crucial to monitor dietary intake trends over time, and understanding relationships between dietary intake and chronic disease development.6 However, accurately measuring and interpreting dietary intake is challenging, and at a population level, some methods such as 24-hour recalls and weighed food records are time and resource intensive.7 Dietary questionnaires, including food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) and brief tools can be less resource intensive to implement on a large scale but come with their own limitations. These include being less comprehensive, potentially only appropriate for use in the context for which they were originally validated and the need to apply calibration equations or sensitivity analyses.8 In this issue, two articles report on validation studies of short dietary questionnaires. Bell et al.9 presented the Preschooler Dietary Questionnaire (PDQ) (11-items) for use in 3-5 year old children (n = 74).9 Compared with a validated FFQ, the PDQ demonstrated moderate relative validity, as dietary risk scores were highly correlated for nutrient-dense or ‘core’ foods and bread and beverages and total risk scores (all r ≥ 0.80), but not for energy-dense nutrient-poor or “non-core” foods (r = 0.67).
The authors concluded that the PDQ is a useful screening tool for identifying dietary risk among pre-schoolers. In another paper, Marakis et al.7 demonstrated moderate/fair validity of a drinks frequency questionnaire (41-items) compared with 7-day weighed food records in a Greek young adult population (n = 59).7 The authors concluded that the questionnaire is a valid and practical monitoring and surveillance tool for measuring habitual drink intake in adults. Han et al.,10 in an additional study in this issue, described the three stage development and validation of a diabetes-related nutrition knowledge questionnaire among a sample of Singaporean adults with type 2 diabetes. Internal consistency, construct validity and test-retest reliability ranged from fair to good after editing, rephrasing and removing items. The authors determined that the questionnaire is a valid and reliable measure of nutrition knowledge in the population group. While these tools offer a valuable alternative to more comprehensive dietary assessment methods, the population that the tool was developed for should be taken into account before deciding to use them in other contexts.
The authors concluded that the PDQ is a useful screening tool for identifying dietary risk among pre-schoolers. In another paper, Marakis et al.7 demonstrated moderate/fair validity of a drinks frequency questionnaire (41-items) compared with 7-day weighed food records in a Greek young adult population (n = 59).7 The authors concluded that the questionnaire is a valid and practical monitoring and surveillance tool for measuring habitual drink intake in adults. Han et al.,10 in an additional study in this issue, described the three stage development and validation of a diabetes-related nutrition knowledge questionnaire among a sample of Singaporean adults with type 2 diabetes. Internal consistency, construct validity and test-retest reliability ranged from fair to good after editing, rephrasing and removing items. The authors determined that the questionnaire is a valid and reliable measure of nutrition knowledge in the population group. While these tools offer a valuable alternative to more comprehensive dietary assessment methods, the population that the tool was developed for should be taken into account before deciding to use them in other contexts.