Abstract
BackgroundNational surveys in public health nutrition commonly record the weight of every food consumed by an individual. However, if the goal is to identify whether individuals are in compliance with the 5 main national nutritional guidelines (sodium, saturated fats, sugars, fruit and vegetables, and fats), much less information may be needed. A previous study showed that tracking only 2.89% of all foods (113/3911) was sufficient to accurately identify compliance. Further reducing the data needs could lower participation burden, thus decreasing the costs for monitoring national compliance with key guidelines.ObjectiveThis study aimed to assess whether national public health nutrition surveys can be further simplified by only recording whether a food was consumed, rather than having to weigh it.MethodsOur dataset came from a generalized sample of inhabitants in the United Kingdom, more specifically from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey 2008-2012. After simplifying food consumptions to a binary value (1 if an individual consumed a food and 0 otherwise), we built and optimized decision trees to find whether the foods could accurately predict compliance with the major 5 nutritional guidelines.ResultsWhen using decision trees of a similar size to previous studies (ie, involving as many foods), we were able to correctly infer compliance for the 5 guidelines with an average accuracy of 80.1%. This is an average increase of 2.5 percentage points over a previous study, showing that further simplifying the surveys can actually yield more robust estimates. When we allowed the new decision trees to use slightly more foods than in previous studies, we were able to optimize the performance with an average increase of 3.1 percentage points.ConclusionsAlthough one may expect a further simplification of surveys to decrease accuracy, our study found that public health dietary surveys can be simplified (from accurately weighing items to simply checking whether they were consumed) while improving accuracy. One possibility is that the simplification reduced noise and made it easier for patterns to emerge. Using simplified surveys will allow to monitor public health nutrition in a more cost-effective manner and possibly decrease the number of errors as participation burden is reduced.
Highlights
Insufficient compliance with dietary guidelines can lead to several health problems, whereas following guidelines can have protective effects
As will be shown in our results, it is not because a food is common that it should be included to identify whether participants meet a dietary guideline
The methods introduced in the previous section select a food if it helps to separate individuals in compliance versus those who are not
Summary
Insufficient compliance with dietary guidelines can lead to several health problems, whereas following guidelines can have protective effects. Other meta-reviews have found that a higher consumption of fruit and vegetables “was significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality” [3] It is, essential to monitor compliance with such guidelines to understand and improve a population’s health. Results: When using decision trees of a similar size to previous studies (ie, involving as many foods), we were able to correctly infer compliance for the 5 guidelines with an average accuracy of 80.1% This is an average increase of 2.5 percentage points over a previous study, showing that further simplifying the surveys can yield more robust estimates. Using simplified surveys will allow to monitor public health nutrition in a more cost-effective manner and possibly decrease the number of errors as participation burden is reduced
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