Dietary Monitoring Tools for Risk Assessment
Meta data
The present document has been produced and adopted by the bodies identified as author(s) in the report. This task has been carried out exclusively by the author(s) in the context of a contract between the European Food Safety Authority and the author(s), awarded following a tender procedure. The present document is published complying with the transparency principle to which the Authority is subject. It may not be considered as an output adopted by the Authority. The European Food Safety Authority reserves its rights, view and position as regards the issues addressed and the conclusions reached in the present document, without prejudice to the rights of the authors.
Abstract
The report details the results of the EFSA contract CFT/EFSA/DCM/2012/02, which aimed to identify and evaluate available data collection protocols and tools for capturing food consumption information, suitable for harmonised data collection in the context of the EFSA EU Menu project. The tasks undertaken and the results generated through this project are described in four sections. Section I describes a review of published and grey literature on dietary assessment tools and methods used to collect food consumption data using 24h recalls and food records primarily in Europe. Section II details the results of an online comprehensive questionnaire (CQ), which was designed to collect information relating to dietary assessment methods used by EU Member States. The information captured by the questionnaire also highlights the country-specific protocols and characteristics, which need to be fully considered when addressing potential harmonisation of dietary data collection. Eleven European Institutes replied to the questionnaire. Six out of the 11 countries (Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Spain and Sweden) further participated in a ring-trial (RT), which is described in Section III of the report. The trial aimed to study the variation in food consumption data collected through different methodologies (e.g. different software, procedures and connected databases) in use in Europe. The two main methods included in the trial were: (a) 24h recalls and (b) food records. Section IV presents the results of the RT and summarises the critical analysis of the data accumulated through both the CQ and the RT. In general most tools used in the RT exhibited good repeatability in recording the reported quantities, as well as the characteristics of the meal occasion. However, tools did not perform similarly well regarding relative accuracy, even when a ±15% tolerance was accepted, and in capturing the qualitative characteristics of the food items, indicating that improvements need to be made either in the interviewers' (24h recalls) or study participants' (food records) training or in the integrated facets and related descriptors. Thorough training of the interviewers/food record keepers, harmonization and automatization of tools' procedures and update of the tools' integrated databases in order to reflect commonalities in Europe and country-specific particularities in a harmonized way would improve the comparability of the data collected in national European studies.