Validation of an instrument to assess food diversity in women of childbearing age in Medellín, Colombia.

Abstract

To validate a Food Diversity Questionnaire (CDA, for its name in Spanish) that identifies the prevalence of the risk of deficiency in the intake of eleven micronutrients. The CDA paper form, an online application for data entry and handling, was designed and compared with the 24-h recall (24HR) as a reference method. All data were processed in Personal Computer Software for Intake Distribution Estimation (PC-SIDE) v1 software. A descriptive analysis and comparisons between prevalence, concordance and reproducibility analyses were performed. Medellín, Colombia. Women of childbearing age between 19 and 50 years (n 186) who worked for the Buen Comienzo programme in 2019. When comparing the adjusted 24HR technique and the CDA, there was no significant difference in population-level data at risk of deficiency in any micronutrient intake. However, based on individual-level data of the best linear unbiased predictor, the concordance analyses were weak, and although agreements were high according to the diagnostic performance tests, a good ability to detect deficiency was only observed in a few nutrients: vitamin A 100·0 %, Ca 98·7 %, Fe 92·8 %, folates 91·6 %, and pyridoxine 81·8 %. The CDA validated in this study is useful and faster at evaluating population-level data at risk of deficiency in the intake of Ca, Fe, Zn, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pyridoxine, folates, vitamin B12, vitamin C and vitamin A. Based on individual-level data, a good ability to detect deficiencies was observed in the intake of vitamin A, Ca, Fe, folates and pyridoxine.