Introduction
The assessment of diet is often a difficult task: accurate evaluation of a
person's diet is dependent on that person's ability to give a precise account of
their food intake; yet the act of recording a person's intake can easily
influence what the person eats during that time, and people tend to have
difficulty remembering what they have eaten. Moreover, the limitations of
computerized nutrient databases renders it impossible to calculate precise
nutrient values in certain foods: these databases may not contain new food items
and do not account for loss of nutrients through cooking, or geographic
differences in soil nutrients where vegetables are grown. Nevertheless, a
methodology does exists that can obtain adequate estimates of dietary intake.
These estimates can then be used to describe intakes of populations and examine
relationships between dietary intakes and disease.
This section will discuss: dietary assessment of the nation, a household, and an
individual; computerized dietary assessment; nutrition monitoring activities;
and recommended intakes of nutrients.
