The accurate assessment of food intakes is an essential prerequisite in monitering the nutritional status of the population and specific subgroups, such as age and gender groups. Dietary intake assessments are an invaluable aid in investigating the links between diet and health. The reasons for collecting measures of dietary intake can be catogorised into three main headings: Public Health, Clinical, and Research. Dietary Assessment for Public Health is used to evaluate nutrition-based intervention programmes and to identify the nutrients being under or over consumed at a national or community level. Clinical Dietary Intake Assesments They are used worldwide to assess the health of populations. Surveys such as NANS ( National Adult Nutrition …show more content…
These include questionaires, recall methods, weighed intake methods, biomarkers and Weighed intake …show more content…
(Potischman and Freudenheim 2003) The main advantage of—or the main assumption behind —dietary biomarkers is that they are objective measures and are independent of all the biases and errors associated with study subjects and dietary assessment methods. (Day et al. 2001; Kaaks et al. 2002; Sugar et al. 2007). The main reasons for using nutritional biomarkers are to provide measures of nutritional status that have less error than dietary data, nutrient status for nutrients with inadequate dietary data, ttain a more proximal and integrated assessment of nutrient status that incorporates metabolism, to assess dietary change and compliance in intervention studies, and dietary intake for the validation of dietary questionnaires. (Potischman