Theme ArticlesA rapid food screener to assess fat and fruit and vegetable intake
Section snippets
Methods
We invited employees of a company in the San Francisco Bay area to participate in a Nutrition Education and Research Program, conducted by the University of California. Each employee received the one-page Food Screener and the full-length, eight-page Food Frequency Questionnaire. Patients self-administered both forms. As incentive, we offered an individual nutritional analysis, the results of which were kept confidential from company management. Of the 402 employees invited, 208 chose to
Results
The Food Screener ranked subjects similarly to estimates from the Block full-length Food Frequency Questionnaire, used here as the gold standard, for a number of important nutrients (Table 2). Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient (r>0.60) showed that the Food Screener ranked subjects quite well with respect to dietary intake of total fat, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, and percent of calories from fat. We also obtained an excellent correlation of the screener with servings of fruits
Discussion
The correlations of the meats/snacks score with fats and cholesterol indicate that the screener can provide estimates of these nutrients similar to rankings obtained from a full-length nutrition questionnaire. If intake of fruits and vegetables is of interest, the fruit/vegetable screener (with the omission of the beans item) produced an excellent estimate of servings of those foods. The correlations of the fruit/vegetables score with associated nutrients as opposed to foods tended to be
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by the Harold Dobbs Cancer Research Fund, UCSF/Mt. Zion Cancer Center, and the Shaklee Corporation.
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