Validation of brief instruments to measure adult fruit and vegetable consumption

Comparison of single questions and brief questionnaire with longer validated food frequency questionnaire to assess adequate fruit and vegetable intake

“…A fouritem FFQ was somewhat similar to the current test methods: Using a threshold of two servings, sensitivity and specificity was 50% and 82%, respectively [32]. In another study using a five-item FFQ, sensitivity, specificity, PPV, and NPV for meeting three daily servings was 72%, 39%, 21%, and 87%, respectively [33]. Thus, this instrument outperformed the present study's vegetable test methods for sensitivity but had much lower specificity (which may be more important for use as a screener to identify those with low intake).…”

“…Legumes were only included in one screener [24], whereas potatoes were specifically excluded in three [24,27,31]. Furthermore, vegetable juice was specified for inclusion in two of the instruments [25,33], whereas fried potato was specified for inclusion in one [33] but excluded in another [30]. The provision and the extent of portion size information also varied, highlighting the heterogeneity and challenges involved in comparing fruit and vegetable intake across different studies.…”

“…Of the 10 vegetable instruments, 3 were SQs [24,25]. Instruments were validated against single or multiple 24-h recalls [25,28,29], a longer FFQ [24,30], nutritional biomarkers [28,31], multiple estimated diet records [27,30], multiple weighed food records [26,32], food records [28], and/or a single diet history interview [33]. Definitions of fruit and vegetables varied.…”

“…However, due to dissimilar statistical methods only two fruit [25,26] and 10 vegetable [24,25,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] instruments are included for comparison. Of the 10 vegetable instruments, 3 were SQs [24,25].…”

“…We are aware of seven validated SQs measuring fruit intake [21][22][23][24][25][26] and 13 validated brief instruments using 10 items measuring vegetable intake [21][22][23][24][25][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] in an adult population. However, due to dissimilar statistical methods only two fruit [25,26] and 10 vegetable [24,25,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33] instruments are included for comparison.…”