Dietary Assessment Methods

Diet may be risk factor that can contribute chronic diseases such as diabetes. It has strong effect in our health which can increase risk of diseases. However, it can reduce exposure to diseases by following adequate and healthy dietary patterns for body needs. There are several methods to assess dietary intake such as 24-hour recalls, food frequency questionnaires, food records, and dietary history. They are different each other by many things. Forth more, this assay will discuss what differences between them.

24-Hour Recall is a classic dietary method, which depends on interviewing the respondent and asking him or her about his or her daily food. The principle of this method is recording the responses of respondent about the food eaten through the one day from the morning to the interview time. However, some interviewer's periods are from mid-night to mid-night. Anyway, interviewers must record the responses in details about the daily food, such as the size of the products, and the brand also.

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After that, interviewer should enter the data on the computer to analyze by diet analysis program. 24-Hour Recall method has various strengths, some of them are the method will not take more than 20 minutes, it is not expensive and it's easy to administrate. On the other hand, it has many limitations. It relies on memory of the respondent which will make the information not accurate and the data entry can be very labour intensive.

Food Record, or Diary is meal by meal record method. The respondent should record amount of all food immediately after eating.

Food sizes should be recorded. There is two different ways to measures the size of food. North African nutrition researchers prefers household measurement which the size can be measured by cups, tablespoons or teaspoons. But European prefers the other way which measures the food by the scale because it is more accurate. The strengths of Food Record, or Diary method is that it is independent on memory and it provides details data about dairy food. Nevertheless, this method has some limitations such as cooperation is highly required and, obtaining data takes long time.

Food frequency questionnaires is one methods of dietary assessment that through it is being assess energy and nutrient intake via determining the number of times that person consumed specific food which are main sources of nutrients in question. theses questionnaires contain list that has 150 at most of individual foods or group foods which are important contributors to the population's intake of energy and nutrients. How many times a day, week, month, or year that they usually consume the foods are indicted by the respondents. In this method portion size is not given, so the questionnaires generally use standard portion size hat is the amounts customarily eaten per serving for various age/sex groups. Food frequency questionnaires have many strengths. Some strengths are self-administered, Machine readable, and inexpensive. However, it has many limitations such as Depending on ability of subject to describe diet.

Finally, Diet history is a method that estimates an individual's usual dietary intake over a long period of time, which may take a month or even a year. First, health habits are very important to be collected by the nutritionist. Secondly, the respondent must provide his or her eating pattern. After that, the nutritionist should perform a cross-check on the data given by respondent. Lastly, nutritionist should do 24-hours recall for 3 days. The strengths of this method are usual nutrient intake assessment and all data on nutrients easy to get. However, it takes very long time to do and it is hard and expansive.