Dietary assessment methods

Dietary assessment tools (DATs)

In epidemiological research, diet is often assessed using dietary assessment tools (DATs).

The aims of most DATs are to collect an accurate record of habitual food and nutrient intake for a group of individuals. This can be extremely difficult, particularly due to the significant variation in dietary intake within individuals.

There has been extensive work in developing DATs. There are two online resources, both supported by the Medical Research Council, which give a comprehensive overview of DATs:

• Nutritools developed by the DIET@NET partnership
• The Measurement Toolkit (previously called the DAPA Measurement Toolkit) developed by the University of Cambridge (also supported by the NHS, European Union, and InterConnect Project)

Each DAT has specific strengths and weakness and the one used should be suitable for the research question, overall study design and population of interest. The reliability and validity of these tools have been discussed in Willett (2013) [6] and guidance on use of DATs is given in the online resources listed above.

The tables below give a brief overview of the main DATs used in the original CLOSER partner studies, namely 24-hour recalls, food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) and diet diaries (information adapted from Willett and Nutritools.org [6, 17]).