Dear Colleagues,

The proper assessment of diet, one of the most complex environmental factors, poses many challenges. Everyone eats, but there is a high intra-individual variability in what is consumed. Everyone is exposed to certain dietary factors, but the degree of exposure varies. In addition, dietary intake interacts with other factors that influence disease risk, such as age, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, and tobacco use.

Over the past decade, new technological advances have opened innovative avenues for diet assessment. In particular, the widespread use of smartphones and advancement of data storage and sharing have enabled less expensive and burdensome dietary intake measurements to be conducted in large-scale settings. Applications, wearables, and virtual images are increasingly being used to capture the dynamic evolution of dietary patterns and habits. Technology offers a great chance to facilitate diet assessment in populations, but the extent to which accurate and detailed data are improving investigations of the role of diet in disease aetiology and prediction is still undetermined. Indeed, the rapid evolution of new technological tools might confuse users’ evaluation of their respective features and challenge the choices made. Future areas of research in this field include the development of proper validation studies, determination of the feasibility of use in technology-illiterate population groups, the reproducibility of methods used, statistical data analysis, and integration. In this Special Issue of Nutrients we aim to give an overview of the historical evolution, current reality, and future of diet assessment in various settings.

Dr. Anne-Kathrin Illner
Guest Editor

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• dietary assessment
• dietary intake
• technology
• population-based studies