Nutrient intake variability induced by processing of food diary data: A pilot study

Abstract

Accurate assessment of nutrient intake of the population represents one of the main challenges in food and nutritional science. Evaluation of food diary is a complicated process, involving choosing the appropriate nutritional database and having well qualified personnel (coders) to work with it. The aim of this study was a comparison of nutrient intake data obtained from one weighed 5-day food diary processed by five master degree students, studying nutrition, focusing on coding errors. Nutrition evaluation was done by Prodi 5.7 Expert Plus computer programme and IBM SPSS Statistics 20 for statistical analysis. Results of our pilot study show that variability of calculated data induced by food coding lonesome is acceptable. Nevertheless putting other errors into account, results can be misleading. On a five-day level macronutrients intake variability is between 5 and 15%, while energy intake variability is within 6%. Uncommon food items and complex composition of the meal have the major impact on observed high standard deviations on a separate meal level. In conclusion the main reason of food coding errors is inaccuracy and incorrect identification of specific food items.

Keywords

• human nutrition
• food diary
• energy intake
• macronutrient intake
• food coding errors