Issues in dietary intake assessment of children and adolescents

Abstract

What children and adolescents say they eat is what they eat and up until the late 1980s, this was the status quo with regard to the assessment of their dietary intakes. It was widely assumed that errors in the dietary assessment of both adults and young people were random, and in the absence of objective and independent markers of food intake, dietary data were tacitly assumed to provide valid measures of usual intake. However, during the 1990s, objective validation studies using estimates of energy expenditure by the doubly labelled water method as a biomarker of energy intake conclusively demonstrated that much of the dietary data of young people were prone to biased reporting, mostly under-reporting.

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