Meal Distribution, Relative Validity and Reproducibility of a Meal-based Food Frequency Questionnaire in Taiwan

• Published in: Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition Vol. 16; no. 4; pp. 766 - 776
• Main Authors: Lyu, Li-Ching, Lin, Chi-Fen, Chang, Fang-Hsin, Chen, Heng-Fei, Lo, Chiao-Chen, Ho, Hong-Fa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Australia HEC Press 01.12.2007
• Subjects: Adult; Carbohydrates; Diet; Diet Records; Diet Surveys; Dietary Carbohydrates - administration & dosage; Dietary Fats - administration & dosage; Dietary Proteins - administration & dosage; Energy; Energy Intake - physiology; Epidemiology; Feeding Behavior; Female; Food; Food Preferences; Humans; Male; Mental Recall; Micronutrients - administration & dosage; Middle Aged; Nutrition Assessment; Nutrition research; Proteins; Public health; Questionnaires; Reproducibility; Reproducibility of Results; Sensitivity and Specificity; Surveys and Questionnaires - standards; Taiwan; Validity; Vitamins; Womens health; Taiwan; 餐次分佈; relative validity; 相對效度; 分餐次之中式食物頻率問卷; reproducibility; Taiwan; 臺灣; meal-based food frequency questionnaire; 信度; meal distribution
• ISSN: 0964-7058; 1440-6047
• DOI: 10.6133/apjcn.2007.16.4.25

Food frequency questionnaire is an important assessment tool for public health nutrition research. We describe the development history and conducted the validity and reproducibility studies for a meal-based Chinese food frequency questionnaire (Chinese FFQ) by five meal sequences. A total of 51 subjects were recruited to collect dietary information twice (6 months apart) with one 24-hr recall, 7-day food records and the Chinese FFQ. Combining data from both time sets, Chinese FFQ showed strong correlations of macro and micronutrients with 7-day records (n=60, r=0.29-0.50, p＜0.05), but not with 24-hr recalls (n=60, r=0.01-0.23, p＞0.05). The reproducibility of this Chinese FFQ (n=22) was consistently high for most nutrients, with Spearman correction coefficients between 0.42 for vitamin A to 0.79 for vitamin B12. From a larger sample of 231 subjects who completed the Chinese FFQ and one 24-hr recall, we found the energy distributions of breakfast, lunch, dinner, afternoon and evening snacks combined from Chinese FFQ were 20%, 37%, 37% and 6%, and from 24-hour recalls were 19%, 36%, 44% and 1%, respectively. These results showed acceptable reproducibility and relative validity of this meal-based Chinese FFQ.