A new simplified dietary history method for measuring intake of energy and macronutrients

In this dietary history method, which preserves the characteristic features of the full dietary history, the principle of simplification is to group several food items into common codes. This enables us to complete both an interview and all nutrient calculations within 35-45 min. In this study we investigated whether the method could replace a 4-day food record for assessing individual intakes of energy and macronutrients. Dietary data were collected from 75 individuals (57 males and 18 females). Protein intake was validated by comparison with 24 h urinary nitrogen excretion (33 subjects), and energy intake was compared to weight maintenance energy intake from a later controlled diet study (19 subjects). When average intakes according to the two methods were compared, dietary history intakes were slightly higher than food record results (0-13%) except for alcohol. Comparison with urinary nitrogen excretion and energy intake data indicate that this is due to an overestimation by the dietary history method, rather than an underestimation by the food record. For individuals most of the correlations between the two methods were in the range 0.5-0.7, but alcohol correlation was down to 0.2. About 75% (53-93%) of the individuals at the extremes of the intake distribution were classified similarly by both methods. Although the ability of the dietary history to predict the individual food record results was unreliable the two methods agreed better when classifying individuals relative to certain cut-off points (sensitivity and specificity values of 0.7-0.9, relative to the food records).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)