Michelle Tan Ching Huey

• Bsc (Honours) Food & Human Nutrition (NUIS)
• Improvement of an online dietary analysis database for use in large-scale dietary surveys

Food Frequency Questionnaires are used extensively in diet and health studies because they are easy to complete and can be administered on-line. Converting the ‘frequency’ of food consumption to daily nutrient intakes requires good estimates of portion size for each food type in the questionnaire.  Our aim was to improve an existing 20-year-old database by updating portion size data using the 2008-2012 National Diet and Nutrition Survey Rolling Programme which reports the types and quantities of foods consumed in the UK. These data were used to update an on-line dietary database to generate a new weighted estimate of portion sizes and nutrient composition. The new database was tested for reliability and compared with the old database. The results showed that portion sizes were significantly bigger in the new dataset. This suggests that people are eating more compared with 20 years ago which might be contributing to the rise in obesity.

Funding source: Newcastle University

Supervisor: Prof Chris Seal