Dietary assessment provides the core information in several research fields ranging from individual food consumption studies to nutritional epidemiology. Complexity deals with the whole dietary pattern description, where several variables need to be treated: list of foods, recipes, food grouping, link to food composition, association with occurrence data, life-cycle assessment indicators, etc. Complexity of determinants - objective and subjective, related to the person and to the social groups the person belongs to, tending to tradition or innovation, real aspects and beliefs, food environment, and so on, must be faced. Complexity of sectors that can be affected by dietary patterns, to be synthetic: health, economics, agriculture, environment, culture. Adopting procedures to guarantee accuracy of the collected information and to submit data to specific software is necessary in order to achieve the goal of estimating interpretable dietary patterns, to use the information on evaluating the effect on food system especially the shift towards sustainable systems.
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 the diet plays a role. Quantitative evaluation and qualitative understanding allow for identifying food styles and to analyze the data to provide a sound scientific information basis for policy makers, educators, citizens, and food system actors.
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 exchanging 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 it is not possible to quantify within the 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 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 increasingly eat 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. As an example, variables related to the evaluation of diet environmental impact have been recently included in the dietary guidelines and then dietary assessment was also adapted to cope with this issue. New methods and tools are currently proposed in the e-Health and m-Health, dietary data are usually analyzed in these contexts. Self-assessment is widely waxing as web tools and internet of things (IoT) are widely available and dietary assessment can become familiar to many people so envisaging a citizen science approach. The emerging question is whether the data quality is steadily ensured and by whom? Is research infrastructure the solution? A generalized harmonized approach and a shared system co-coordinated are so far?
Possible titles are listed below:
• Building international database: the DAFNE project/the EU-Menu program/the GIFT project
• Citizens science
• 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
• Environmental impact assessment
• 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
• Food system
• Indicators for assessing achievements of Sustainable Development Goals
• 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
• Research infrastructure
• Software for dietary assessment studies
• Specific dietary patterns, the vegetarian diet
• Food consumption sustainability
• Systematic Literature Review: vitamins intake assessment
Dietary assessment provides the core information in several research fields ranging from individual food consumption studies to nutritional epidemiology. Complexity deals with the whole dietary pattern description, where several variables need to be treated: list of foods, recipes, food grouping, link to food composition, association with occurrence data, life-cycle assessment indicators, etc. Complexity of determinants - objective and subjective, related to the person and to the social groups the person belongs to, tending to tradition or innovation, real aspects and beliefs, food environment, and so on, must be faced. Complexity of sectors that can be affected by dietary patterns, to be synthetic: health, economics, agriculture, environment, culture. Adopting procedures to guarantee accuracy of the collected information and to submit data to specific software is necessary in order to achieve the goal of estimating interpretable dietary patterns, to use the information on evaluating the effect on food system especially the shift towards sustainable systems.
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 the diet plays a role. Quantitative evaluation and qualitative understanding allow for identifying food styles and to analyze the data to provide a sound scientific information basis for policy makers, educators, citizens, and food system actors.
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 exchanging 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 it is not possible to quantify within the 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 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 increasingly eat 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. As an example, variables related to the evaluation of diet environmental impact have been recently included in the dietary guidelines and then dietary assessment was also adapted to cope with this issue. New methods and tools are currently proposed in the e-Health and m-Health, dietary data are usually analyzed in these contexts. Self-assessment is widely waxing as web tools and internet of things (IoT) are widely available and dietary assessment can become familiar to many people so envisaging a citizen science approach. The emerging question is whether the data quality is steadily ensured and by whom? Is research infrastructure the solution? A generalized harmonized approach and a shared system co-coordinated are so far?
Possible titles are listed below:
• Building international database: the DAFNE project/the EU-Menu program/the GIFT project
• Citizens science
• 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
• Environmental impact assessment
• 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
• Food system
• Indicators for assessing achievements of Sustainable Development Goals
• 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
• Research infrastructure
• Software for dietary assessment studies
• Specific dietary patterns, the vegetarian diet
• Food consumption sustainability
• Systematic Literature Review: vitamins intake assessment
