Food Questionnaires and Dietary Recalls: The Challenges of Assessing Food Consumption to Identify Poor Nutrition in a Changing World.
Whether traditional tools such FFQ or 24 hour recall are used, health care practitioners, epidemiologists and ultimately policy makers, should realize that there may be errors due to memory lapses of participants, misinterpretation by interviewers, poor nutrition education knowledge and the lack of interest by participants in responding to long questionnaires. Still, researchers desire to assess appropriately these populations and each individual’s food intake patterns in order to improve overall nutrition, overcome nutritional deficiencies and control the chronic non communicable diseases which are epidemic around the world.
Comparison and validation of short tools such as the one conducted by Cook et al.20 supports its use to establish population needs. The fact Cook et al. found that using a SQ for assessing fruit consumption, a SQ for vegetable consumption and a 5 item Vegetable Fruit Questionnaire (VFQ)
could replace a longer FFQ for estimation of population intakes of these foods and for screening its adequacy is an interesting finding, and is valuable and give some alternatives to the traditional, more complex tools.
Prevention of chronic diseases related to nutrition, in consequence there is much epidemiologic interest for obtaining accurate estimates of mean or median intakes and (when possible)
distribution of consumption of these foods. When a particular dietary pattern lacks these foods
because they are expensive, and are difficult to access for the poorest segments of population,
or because nutrition knowledge is low, it is important to introduce some actions to improve this
situation.
Adv Food Technol Nutr Sci Open J. 2015; 1(2): 58-61.doi: 10.17140/AFTNSOJ-1-109
