About this Research Topic
Quantitative dietary assessment is a cross-cutting theme for several research fields: nutrition, nutritional epidemiology, food chain evaluation, consumer’s behavior, dietary risk assessment, dietary security and adequacy, as it represents the first step in studies where diet plays a role. Quantitative evaluation and qualitative understanding allows for identification of food styles and to analyze the data to provide a sound scientific information basis for policy makers, educators, and food managers.
There is a strong need for fixing theoretical aspects, (e.g. food classification still addressed within the food coding task but not statistically tested) and a need for creating a best practice community. This community needs to exchange experiences in managing the “non-sampling/non-probabilistic” errors requiring a procedural approach to be tackled, i.e., those aspects potentially affecting the results that are not possible to quantify within the available statistical tools (e.g., accuracy, standardization, software tools, etc.).
Systematic literature reviews can help to properly describe the use of different dietary assessment tools from the easiest ones to the most difficult ones classifying them according to the degree of difficulty, and analyzing the most frequent use by research fields. The overall context is applied to food science and societal challenges trying to address new fields of application when occurring.
In this field some peculiar hot topics are still unresolved, particularly the composite food issue related on the one side to the ultra-processed food theme and the other side to recent trends in kitchen routines (less cooking more purchasing) leading to the increased eating of composite foods.
Emerging topics can be identified following the surveillance and monitoring programs collating secondary data delivered by national statistic bureaus. New indicators can also be proposed to the scientific community.
New methods and tools are currently proposed in the e-Health and mHealth, dietary data are usually analyzed in these contexts. Is the data quality easily ensured?
Can these approached be transferred to dietary safety evaluation too?
Several research questions can be addressed, the higher quality the data are the more reliable the estimates are.
Possible titles are listed below.
• Building international database: the DAFNE project/the EU-Menu program/the GIFT project
• Composite food a challenge in estimating dietary assessment
• Developing dietary recommendations and new approaches to enhance the nutritional adequacy
• Developing software for dietary data management
• Dietary and other sources exposure
• Dietary assessment problematic issues
• Dietary exposure: the duplicate diet approach
• Dietary exposure: the national total diet studies in Spain
• Dietary exposure: the probabilistic approach
• Dietary intake in surveillance
• Dietary patterns in epidemiological studies
• Estimating salt: special methodological requirements
• Food additives in the diet
• Food chemicals: nutrients and others
• Food coding the need for a common language for dietary evaluation
• Food consumption patterns across age classes
• Food safety issues
• Intake exposure: food monitoring and total diet studies
• Italian dietary patterns
• Multi-centric European studies
• Nationwide dietary surveys
• Nutritional epidemiology
• Nutritional patterns
• Public health issues in dietary evaluation: building indicators / cooking derived contaminants/ the catering sector
• Quality management system for nutritional data
• Software for dietary assessment studies
• Specific dietary patterns,the vegetarian diet
• Systematic Literature Review: vitamins intake assessment
Keywords: dietary intake, dietary assessment, nutritional profiles, dietary safety, food intake patterns
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