• Petra A Wark, Laura J Hardie, Gary S Frost, Nisreen A Alwan, Michelle Carter, Paul Elliott, Heather E Ford, Neil Hancock, Michelle A Morris, Umme Z Mulla, Essra A Noorwali, K Petropoulou, David Murphy, Gregory D M Potter, Elio Riboli, Darren C Greenwood, and Janet E Cade.
• Centre for Innovative Research Across the Life Course (CIRAL), Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB, UK.
• Bmc Med. 2018 Aug 9; 16 (1): 136136.

BackgroundOnline dietary assessment tools can reduce administrative costs and facilitate repeated dietary assessment during follow-up in large-scale studies. However, information on bias due to measurement error of such tools is limited. We developed an online 24-h recall (myfood24) and compared its performance with a traditional interviewer-administered multiple-pass 24-h recall, assessing both against biomarkers.MethodsMetabolically stable adults were recruited and completed the new online dietary recall, an interviewer-based multiple pass recall and a suite of reference measures. Longer-term dietary intake was estimated from up to 3 × 24-h recalls taken 2 weeks apart. Estimated intakes of protein, potassium and sodium were compared with urinary biomarker concentrations. Estimated total sugar intake was compared with a predictive biomarker and estimated energy intake compared with energy expenditure measured by accelerometry and calorimetry. Nutrient intakes were also compared to those derived from an interviewer-administered multiple-pass 24-h recall.ResultsBiomarker samples were received from 212 participants on at least one occasion. Both self-reported dietary assessment tools led to attenuation compared to biomarkers. The online tools resulted in attenuation factors of around 0.2-0.3 and partial correlation coefficients, reflecting ranking intakes, of approximately 0.3-0.4. This was broadly similar to the more administratively burdensome interviewer-based tool. Other nutrient estimates derived from myfood24 were around 10-20% lower than those from the interviewer-based tool, with wide limits of agreement. Intraclass correlation coefficients were approximately 0.4-0.5, indicating consistent moderate agreement.ConclusionsOur findings show that, whilst results from both measures of self-reported diet are attenuated compared to biomarker measures, the myfood24 online 24-h recall is comparable to the more time-consuming and costly interviewer-based 24-h recall across a range of measures.

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