Dietary Food Record Charts and digital photography effectively estimate hospital meal consumption

Optimal nutritional intake is essential to support nutritional status and improve recovery in hospital patients. To monitor adequate food intake in patients, reliable and accessible methods to quantify patient food intake accurately are needed. The present study aims to compare the accuracy of two methods, Food Record Charts (FRCs) and Digital Photography (DP), in estimating food intake with the gold standard of Weighed Food Records (WFRs).

Thirty nurses, healthcare assistants, and researchers participated in a single-blind, prospective study to estimate food consumption using both FRCs and DP for 27 different hospital meals (6 breakfasts, 6 lunches, 6 dinners, and 9 snacks) consisting of 108 different food items. FRCs and DP estimates were compared to WFRs using the average estimations of all participants. Bland-Altman plots were used to identify any discrepancies in the accuracy of food intake estimation.

FRCs overestimated food consumption by 3.2 ± 14.7 % and DP by 4.7 ± 15.8 % compared to WFRs. The Bland-Altman plots showed limited variation. Similar results were found when analyzing energy and protein content subcategories, the consumed amount, food categories, and food consistency. The inter-rater agreement was W = 0.733 (P = 0.000) and W = 0.682 (P = 0.000) for FRCs and DP, respectively.

FRCs and DP are accurate methods for quantifying food consumption in hospital meals compared to WFRs, with an overestimation of food consumption by less than 5 %.