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. 2016 Aug 5;8(8):480.
doi: 10.3390/nu8080480.

Development of a New Branded UK Food Composition Database for an Online Dietary Assessment Tool

Michelle C Carter  1 , Neil Hancock  2 , Salwa A Albar  3   4 , Helen Brown  5 , Darren C Greenwood  6 , Laura J Hardie  7 , Gary S Frost  8 , Petra A Wark  9 , Janet E Cade  10
Affiliations

Development of a New Branded UK Food Composition Database for an Online Dietary Assessment Tool

Michelle C Carter et al. Nutrients. .

Abstract

The current UK food composition tables are limited, containing ~3300 mostly generic food and drink items. To reflect the wide range of food products available to British consumers and to potentially improve accuracy of dietary assessment, a large UK specific electronic food composition database (FCDB) has been developed. A mapping exercise has been conducted that matched micronutrient data from generic food codes to "Back of Pack" data from branded food products using a semi-automated process. After cleaning and processing, version 1.0 of the new FCDB contains 40,274 generic and branded items with associated 120 macronutrient and micronutrient data and 5669 items with portion images. Over 50% of food and drink items were individually mapped to within 10% agreement with the generic food item for energy. Several quality checking procedures were applied after mapping including; identifying foods above and below the expected range for a particular nutrient within that food group and cross-checking the mapping of items such as concentrated and raw/dried products. The new electronic FCDB has substantially increased the size of the current, publically available, UK food tables. The FCDB has been incorporated into myfood24, a new fully automated online dietary assessment tool and, a smartphone application for weight loss.

Keywords: dietary assessment; food composition database; nutrition assessment.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow chart of the myfood24 electronic food composition database development process. “BOP” = Back of Pack.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The semi-automated system for mapping branded foods from the BOP nutrition data to the most appropriate generic food. Sprats are showing in this list because, based on the mapping algorithm, they were nutritionally similar to the branded products on the 4 macronutrients. The nutritionist coding made the final decision which food in the list was most appropriate to map to and in what proportion.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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