Abstract
BackgroundAdequate nutrition is essential for individual and population level health. However, determining adequacy of daily nutrient intake in research studies is often challenging given the unique nutritional needs of individuals. Herein, we examine construct, predictive, criterion, content, and concurrent validity of a dietary analytic tool – My Nutrition Index (MNI) for measuring nutrient intake in relation to personalized daily nutrient intake guidelines. MNI gauges adequacy of an individual’s daily nutrient intake based on his or her unique demographic and lifestyle characteristics. MNI accounts for potential adverse effects of inadequate and excess nutrient consumption.MethodsMNI, calculated based on 34 nutrients, provides an overall index score ranging from 0 to 100, with higher scores reflecting a more nutritious diet. We calculated MNI scores for 7154 participants ages 18-65 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (2007-2014) by using average nutrient intakes from two 24-h dietary recalls. Survey-weighted binary logistic regression models were used to assess associations between MNI scores and obesity, depression, health perceptions, and past or present cardiovascular disease.ResultsHigher MNI scores were associated with lower prevalence of self-reported cardiovascular disease (OR = 0.69, CI: 0.52, 0.92, p = 0.012), depression (OR = 0.76, CI: 0.65, 0.90, p < 0.001), and obesity (OR = 0.92, CI: 0.87, 0.99, p = 0.016), as well as more favorable health perceptions (OR = 1.24, CI: 1.13, 1.37, p < 0.001).ConclusionsMNI provides an individualized approach for measuring adequacy/sufficiency of daily nutrient intake that can validly be employed to assess relationships between nutrition and health outcomes in research studies.
Highlights
Adequate nutrition is essential for individual and population level health
These include: calculating indices such as the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) [6,7,8,9], measuring adherence to diets or nutritional recommendations empirically related to more favorable health outcomes, such as the Mediterranean Diet (MeDi), Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH) or American Heart Association diet and lifestyle recommendations [10,11,12], or applying outcome-independent statistical approaches to characterize quality of daily nutrient intake from food frequency questionnaire or dietary recall data [13]
Spearman correlations between My Nutrition Index (MNI) scores and individual nutrients, adjusted for caloric intake resulted in positive correlations for all vitamins and most nutrients that promote health (i.e. “good nutrients”) and negative correlations for most nutrients that tend to detract from health when consumed in excess (Fig. 3)
Summary
Adequate nutrition is essential for individual and population level health. determining adequacy of daily nutrient intake in research studies is often challenging given the unique nutritional needs of individuals. Capturing the nutritional value of a comprehensive diet in population-based studies is often challenging because nutritional guidelines vary among individuals based on their demographics, There are several different methods commonly implemented for measuring quality and/or adequacy of daily nutrient intake in research studies These include: calculating indices such as the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) [6,7,8,9], measuring adherence to diets or nutritional recommendations empirically related to more favorable health outcomes, such as the Mediterranean Diet (MeDi), Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH) or American Heart Association diet and lifestyle recommendations [10,11,12], or applying outcome-independent statistical approaches (i.e. factor analysis or cluster analysis) to characterize quality of daily nutrient intake from food frequency questionnaire or dietary recall data [13]. We examined convergent and construct validity by examining the correlation between MNI and HEI
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