The Pacific Tracker (PacTrac): Development of a dietary assessment instrument for the Pacific

Abstract

The Pacific Tracker (PacTrac) is a new dietary assessment program that can be used to evaluate dietary data for nutrition studies in the Pacific Islands. PacTrac is a modification of the Interactive Healthy Eating Index (IHEI) developed by the US Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion as an online interactive dietary assessment tool for use by the public. Creation of PacTrac required several modifications to the IHEI, including a function to save data to allow for later access and addition of Pacific Island foods. Sources for Pacific Island foods included the Cancer Research Center of Hawaii (CRCH) Food Composition Table (FCT) and recipes from Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). Initially, 344 foods in the CRCH FCT were added to the IHEI. Feedback from pilot sessions indicated it was too large and therefore difficult to navigate. Therefore, we removed the original IHEI database (over 7000 foods) and replaced it with the CRCH FCT (2778 foods) plus 85 recipes from Guam and 40 recipes from CNMI. We are currently using PacTrac to evaluate dietary data in Hawaii, Guam and CNMI. The program can be accessed at http://pactrac.crch.hawaii.edu/.