Methodological issues in food surveys

Abstract

the nutritional recommendations, institutions like the WHO and EFSA have moved away from using observed intakes for their guidelines and started using a factorial method [2,3]. We do agree with the statement of Alexy and Hilbig that only a small number of infants were used to determine the energy deposition using doubly labeled water technique. Regardless, recommending a restrictive eating pattern in this young age group from our findings would indeed not be the appropriate next step, as young children seem perfectly able to self-regulate their food intake. It is, however, well known that already at the stage of bottle feeding, mothers can have the tendency to overrule satiety signals of their babies, with the risk of over-feeding [4]. That is why we advocated an actual intervention study in our discussion, in which it would be especially interesting to investigate the effect of a lowered protein intake. This would take place in controlled circumstances and would allow us to draw conclusions regarding causality.