Perspectives of Dietary Assessment in Human Health and Disease

Abstract

Diet and human health have a complex set of relationships, so it is crucial to identify the cause-effects paths and their management. Diet is crucial for maintaining health (prevention) and unhealthy diets or diet components can cause disease in the long term (non-communicable disease) but also in the short term (foodborne diseases). The present paper aims to provide a synthesis of current research in the field of dietary assessment in health and disease as an introduction to the special issue on "Dietary Assessment and Human Health and Disease". Dietary assessment, continuously evolving in terms of methodology and tools, provides the core information basis for all the studies where it is necessary to disentangle the relationship between diet and human health and disease. Estimating dietary patterns allows for assessing dietary quality, adequacy, exposure, and environmental impact in nutritional surveillance so on the one hand, providing information for further clinical studies and on another hand, helping the policy to design tailored interventions considering individual and planetary health, considering that planetary health is crucial for individual health too, as the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has taught. Overall, dietary assessment should be a core component in One-Health-based initiatives to tackle public health nutrition issues.

Keywords: dietary assessment; disease; food consumption study; human health; individual dietary survey; nutritional database system; nutritional databases; nutritional-related concepts; public health nutrition; surveillance.

Figure 1

Diet health and disease: a visual map connecting components. Source: own design. Note: each rectangle represents a concept the lines indicate direct links and the arrows indicate the direction. Diet-health and disease relationships are regulated by the exposome, condensing determinants coming from the diverse components, and are immersed in a wider system whose major components are food system and public health nutrition formulating policies, supporting research, planning education, and information programs.