Estimation of portion size in children's dietary assessment: lessons learnt

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Assessing the dietary intake of young children is challenging. In any 1 day, children may have several carers responsible for providing them with their dietary requirements, and once children reach school age, traditional methods such as weighing all items consumed become impractical. As an alternative to weighed records, food portion size assessment tools are available to assist subjects in estimating the amounts of foods consumed. Existing food photographs designed for use with adults and based on adult portion sizes have been found to be inappropriate for use with children. This article presents a review and summary of a body of work carried out to improve the estimation of portion sizes consumed by children. Methods: Feasibility work was undertaken to determine the accuracy and precision of three portion size assessment tools; food photographs, food models and a computer-based Interactive Portion Size Assessment System (IPSAS). These tools were based on portion sizes served to children during the National Diet and Nutrition Survey. As children often do not consume all of the food served to them, smaller portions were included in each tool for estimation of leftovers. The tools covered 22 foods, which children commonly consume. Children were served known amounts of each food and leftovers were recorded. They were then asked to estimate both the amount of food that they were served and the amount of any food leftover. Results: Children were found to estimate food portion size with an accuracy approaching that of adults using both the food photographs and IPSAS. Conclusions: Further development is underway to increase the number of food photographs and to develop IPSAS to cover a much wider range of foods and to validate the use of these tools in a 'real life' setting. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition IntroductionMeasuring young children's dietary intake is challenging. When children are responsible for reporting their own intake issues of literacy, writing skills, memory constraints and concentration span are of particular concern. From previous studies (Foster, 2003;Anderson et al., 2005;Foster et al., 2008), a personal observation is that there is a great deal of variation in the ability to recall foods consumed within any one age group. This may be dependent on an individual's cognitive development, interest in food, and the attention paid to mealtimes.Children often have multiple carers in any one day, and although parents may provide accurate accounts of what their children eat at home, many are unable to give details of what they consume at school (Livingstone et al., 1992). The school dinner hall is too busy an environment for staff to pay attention to individual children's intakes.This article presents a review and summary of a body of work carried out to improve the estimation of portion sizes consumed by children. For further details on methodology refer Foster (2003), Anderson et al. (2005) and Foster et al. (2008). Portion size assessmentIn order for intakes of food to...

Feasibility of 2 × 24-h dietary recalls combined with a food-recording booklet, using EPIC-Soft, among schoolchildren

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Validação da terceira versão do Questionário Alimentar do Dia Anterior (QUADA-3) para escolares de 6 a 11 anos

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“…O instrumento não foi delineado para obter informações sobre freqüências e quantidades, pois essas capacidades não estão bem desenvolvidas em crianças que ainda não alcançaram o estágio de raciocínio abstrato 16,17 .…”

Reliability and Validity of a Modified MEDFICTS Dietary Fat Screener in South African Schoolchildren Are Determined by Use and Outcome Measures

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