Applying Dietary Assessment Methods for Food Fortication and Other Nutrition Programs

Coates J, Colaiezzi B, Fiedler J, Wirth J, Lividini K, Rogers B.

September 2012, GAIN Working Paper Series

Dietary assessment data are essential for designing, implementing and evaluating food fortification and other food-based nutrition programs. Planners and managers must understand the validity, usefulness and cost tradeoffs of employing alternative dietary assessment methods to obtain requisite programming information, but little guidance exists for doing so. This paper strives to fill this gap in the literature while providing practical guidance to inform programming decisions. Twenty-five semi-structured expert interviews were conducted and literature reviewed for scientific and operational information on four of the most common dietary assessment methods used in nutrition programming: Twenty-four hour recall (24HR), Food Frequency Questionnaires/Fortification Rapid Assessment Tool (FFQ/FRAT), Food Balance Sheets (FBS), and Household Consumption and Expenditure Surveys (HCES).