Short Dietary Assessment Instruments

Overview

Short dietary assessment instruments, often called screeners, may be useful in situations that do not require assessment of the total diet or quantitative accuracy in dietary estimates.

Estimates of intake from short dietary assessment instruments are not as accurate as those from more detailed methods, such as 24-hour dietary recalls.

Instruments and Analytical Files

View links to various dietary screeners described in the table on this page, SAS code, and other related files.

View Files

Short dietary assessment instruments may be most useful for:

• characterizing a population's median intakes;
• discriminating among individuals or populations with regard to higher vs. lower intakes;
• examining interrelationships between diet and other variables; and
• comparing findings from a smaller study to a larger population study.

Recognizing the need for these tools, the Risk Factor Assessment Branch (RFAB) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) has developed several short instruments that assess intake of fruits and vegetables, percentage energy from fat, fiber, added sugars, whole grains, calcium, dairy products, and red and processed meats.

Some of these tools have been evaluated in cross-sectional general population studies, and in self-selected samples in intervention research. In addition, these tools have been used in large population studies, such as the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), which had only very limited room for questions on diet.

RFAB also created the Register of Validated Short Dietary Assessment Instruments to provide easy access to descriptive information about validated short dietary assessment instruments developed by the broader scientific community.

The table below summarizes the possible dietary constructs measured by the various dietary screeners that NCI staff have developed. View screeners, related methodological information, and analytic files associated with the dietary assessment tools used in the surveys below.