Objective: To nutritionally analyse mean energy intake (EI) from different 3 d intervals within a 7 d recording period and to evaluate the seasonal effect on energy and nutrient intake. Design: Cross-sectional study of dietary intake collected with 7 d food diaries. Setting: Aberdeen, north-east Scotland, UK, between 2002 and 2004. Subjects: Participants from two long-term trials were pooled. These trials, investigating genetic and environmental influences on body weight, were the Genotyping And Phenotyping (GAP) study and a cohort observational study, Rowett Assessment of Childhood Appetite and metaboLism (RASCAL). There were 260 Caucasian adults, BMI range 16?7-49?3 kg/m 2 , age range 21-64 years. Results: Mean EI for Wednesday, Friday and Saturday had the closest approximation to the 7 d mean (0?1 % overestimate). A gender 3 season interaction (P 5 0?019) with a different intake pattern for females and males was observed. For females, lower mean (SE) EI was recorded in summer (8117 (610) kJ) and autumn (7941 (699) kJ) compared with spring (8929 (979) kJ) and winter (8132 (1041) kJ). For males, higher mean (SE) EI was recorded in summer (10 420 (736) kJ) and autumn (10 490 (1041) kJ) compared with spring (9319 (1441) kJ) and winter (9103 (1505) kJ).
Conclusions:The study results indicate that 3 d weighed intakes recorded from Wednesday, Friday and Saturday are most representative of 7 d habitual intake in free-living subjects. They also indicate that seasonality has a limited effect on EI and no effect on macronutrient intake.
Keywords
Dietary assessment Seasonal food intakeWeighed intake Food diary Metabolic rateWeighed diet records are considered the 'gold standard' when examining free-living energy and nutrient intake, with seven days of recording regarded as the best compromise between accuracy, investigator workload and subject compliance (1) . In practice however, 3 d weighed dietary records are often the assessment tool chosen by investigators for intervention studies, as they are deemed to be less intrusive for subjects (2) and can therefore improve subject recruitment. With the shorter recording period comes the concern whether the three recording days are representative of habitual intake (3) . Therefore, much research has focused on identifying feasible intakes and attempting to correct intake data. Specifically, the effects of 'misreporting' or 'under-reporting' of food intake (4) has been a main focus of attention, following better energy expenditure (and thus energy balance) methodology (5) . Within the literature, there has been less emphasis on the practical issues such as when to ask subjects to record, i.e. which day(s) or the effect of season, which may have an effect on achieving an assessment of habitual intake. Hartman et al. (6) reported that non-consecutive days were preferable due to a correlation between eating behaviour on consecutive days and Bingham (7) recommended a 3 d diary to include one weekend day and two weekdays, since weekend days are known to indicate higher repor...