Diet quality is a major contributor to human health. In addition, antioxidants have a great contribution to several chronic conditions. The purpose of this study was to evaluate if dietary total antioxidant capacity (TAC) can be considered as a measure of diet quality in a Middle Eastern country.
In this cross-sectional study on 6,724 Iranian adults, we used a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) to assess dietary intakes. Data derived from the FFQ was used to calculate dietary TAC and well-known diet quality scores including alternate healthy eating index (AHEI) and dietary diversity score (DDS). Dietary TAC was calculated based on the ferric reducing-antioxidant power (FRAP) values reported in earlier publications. AHEI and DDS have also been constructed based on previous publications. Cross-classification was used to examine the agreement between these measures.
Mean age and BMI of study participants were 36.89 ± 8.08 y and 24.97 ± 3.87 kg/m2, respectively. We found that individuals in the highest tertile of dietary TAC had higher scores of AHEI (57.53 ± 0.20 vs. 52.03 ± 0.20,
We found that dietary TAC might be considered as a proper measure for the assessment of diet quality because it was well correlated with well-known measures of diet quality including DDS and AHEI scores.