Development and Evaluation of a Functional Food Consumption Index (FunFoCI) in Adults

Area of Science:

• Nutrition Science
• Dietary Assessment
• Public Health

Background:

• Functional foods are recognized for health benefits but lack standardized consumption metrics.
• Quantifying functional food intake is crucial for nutritional research and public health initiatives.
• Existing methods do not adequately capture the nuanced consumption of functional foods.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and initially evaluate the Functional Food Consumption Index (FunFoCI) for adults.
• To establish a standardized, food-based metric for assessing functional food consumption.
• To assess the performance of FunFoCI in a diverse adult population.

Main Methods:

• Developed the FunFoCI comprising 100 foods across nine groups, validated by expert review.
• Assessed 500 adults using a quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and 3-day food record (FR).
• Employed a sample distribution-based scoring approach with normalization and weighting for index calculation.

Main Results:

• The FunFoCI demonstrated good content validity (S-CVI/Ave = 0.912).
• Mean FunFoCI scores differed between FFQ and FR methods, indicating potential for method-specific interpretation.
• FunFoCI showed significant correlations with established diet quality indices (DQI-I, HEI-2015) and varied across sociodemographic factors.

Conclusions:

• The FunFoCI is a novel, expert-validated, food-based index for quantifying functional food consumption in adults.
• Initial evaluation supports FunFoCI's utility for standardized relative intake assessment.
• Further research is recommended to assess reliability and external validity in diverse populations and study designs.