What is it about?

We describe and test a relatively novel and simple way of describing diet quality. When studying relationships between diet and disease, it is necessary to classify diets as more or less healthy. For a diet to be healthy it needs to include lots of food groups in the right proportion, and lots of nutrients. This makes classifying a given person's diet as healthy or unhealthy difficult. We tested the idea that energy density (kcals/g) can be a simple way to describe diet. By comparing intakes of foods and nutrients in people with different levels of energy density, this is essentially what we found - the higher the energy density, the less healthy the diet.

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Why is it important?

There are a number of methods available to classify diets (scores, indexes, statistical methods to identify patterns etc) but they are often not comparable across studies. We propose that this simple method can be used when other methods are not suitable. It can also be a complimentary method which, if included, would make the results from other studies easier to compare, potentially advancing future reviews and meta-analyses.

Perspectives

This work arose from the need to classify overall dietary quality in a dataset where the first choice of method (dietary pattern analysis) was not suitable due to the data available. We didn't want to develop yet another new index from scratch. Dietary energy density was intuitively appealing and we felt it was worth testing!

Dr Emma Patterson
Karolinska Institutet

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Dietary energy density as a marker of dietary quality in Swedish children and adolescents: the European Youth Heart Study, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, January 2010, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/ejcn.2009.160.
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