Abstract
The evaluation of food intake based on various assessment methods is critical and underreporting is frequent. The aim of the study was to develop an indirect statistical method of the total energy intake estimation based on gender, weight and the number of portions. Energy intake prediction was developed and evaluated for validity using energy expenditure measurements given by the WellBeNet app. A total of 190 volunteers with various BMIs were recruited and assigned either in the train or the test sample. The mean energy provided by a portion was evaluated by linear regression models from the train sample. The absolute values of the error between the energy intake estimation and the energy expenditure measurement were calculated for each volunteer, by subgroup and for the whole group. The performance of the models was determined using the validation dataset. As the number of portions is the only variable used in the model, the error was 30.7% and 26.5% in the train and test sample. After adding body weight in the model, the error in absolute value decreased to 8.8% and 10.8% for the normal-weight women and men, and 11.7% and 12.8% for the overweight female and male volunteers, respectively. The findings of this study indicate that a statistical approach and knowledge of the usual number of portions and body weight is effective and sufficient to obtain a precise evaluation of energy intake (about 10% of error) after a simple and brief enquiry.
Published Version
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