Nutrition Methodology & Assessment

Dietary surveys play an important role in monitoring the nutritional status of populations and evaluating relationships between diet and health. Dietary assessment can be used to describe types and amounts of food and food components, either actual or habitual intakes, and potential exposure to risks. Dietary assessment can be further used to compare dietary patterns across populations or changes over time to highlight current and future public health topics, but the usage of different assessment methods and instruments still limits the comparability across studies and populations over time. As misreporting of intake challenges the investigation of associations with health outcomes, the use of biomarkers may provide a solution: they complement the results of self-reported dietary assessment. Modern data management faciliates the application of innovative technologies (e-health, m-health) for dietary assessment and feedback to populations. The modern information system increasingly allows for collaboration between surveilance systems or research groups and among citizens.

We encourage the submission of manuscripts that provide novel insights and papers that report significant advances in the fields. Topics include, but are not limited, to:

• Methodological studies, such as validation studies, biomarker studies, pilot studies, and studies on diet quality indices/scores
• Dietary assessment methodologies in different contexts such as surveillance programs, epidemiological studies, and clinical trials
• The role of dietary assessment in e-health and in m-health applications
• Methods to explain health outcomes based on dietary intake or behavior patterns using innovative statistical methods
• Application of causal inference methodology to answer substantial nutrition questions from complex survey data and
• Applications for dietary management, dietary education, and dietary feedback to survey participants and populations.