Improving dietary data collection tools for better nutritional assessment – A systematic review

Dietary assessment, one of the four basic components of nutritional assessment, is required yet difficult to correctly measure in order to establish accurate links with health outcomes. The current systematic review was conducted to study the effectiveness and limitations of various types of dietary assessment tools as well as to pool qualitative evidence on comparing manual and digital versions of the same tool. Studies published between 2010-June 2021 comparing various types and/ or versions of dietary data collection tools by reporting at least one outcome variable (reliability, feasibility, validity and acceptability) were searched from Pubmed, advanced search in Google scholar, and Cochrane library. A total of 33 studies were considered eligible for final analyses. All studies showed a good agreement between the tested dietary assessment tool and the gold standard adopted (n = 25). The studies conducted to find out feasibility and acceptability of digital versions of tools also showed positive results (n = 9). Technological advancement in dietary assessment can offer promising outcomes in research as well as clinical settings.