Misreporting in nutritional surveys: Methodological implications

Abstract

The reliability of the information collected in dietary assessment can be affected by different factors. One of the main sources of error in dietary assessment is misreporting which encompass under- and overreporting. Underreporting of food intake is one of the major problems in the assessment of habitual dietary intake. Physical and psychosocial characteristics that are related to energy underreporting include sex, age, weight, BMI, fear of negative evaluation and dieting among others. At present, diverse reference methods are employed to verify the results of dietary assessment and double labelled water is used as the gold standard method. Underreporting affects the estimation of nutrient intake and also alters associations between diet and disease assessed in epidemiological studies. Therefore, underreporting has to be considered and addressed by researchers through development and improvement of dietary intake adjustment methods, and taking advantage of the new technologies for assessing dietary intake in order to minimize underreporting bias.