Traditional and New Dietary Assessment Methods (TANDAM) for Personalized Nutrition

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Errors in dietary assessment methods attenuate the association between diet and chronic disease outcomes, such as obesity and cancer, which derails efforts to aggressively pursue policies directed to improving dietary intakes in the population. Harnessing the capabilities of mobile-based and image-based technology tools offer an opportunity to reach a wide audience via cost-effective, convenient, timely, and familiar channels. Properly constructed and validated, these tools would eliminate the labor-intensive coding required for traditional paper and interview methods. Successfully creating tools which tap into several specialty areas of science and behavior requires a multidisciplinary team of scientists. For several, the research group represented in the proposal have been committed to advancing dietary assessment methods. We have made progress with harnessing the availability of the ubiquitous and popular mobile telephone, passive methods, and the Automated Self- Administered 24-Hour Dietary Assessment (ASA24). Our research group represents a partnership between nutrition scientists/epidemiologists, engineers specializing in image analysis, Registered Dietitians, and biostatistions. Having completed multiple studies demonstrating the efficacy of the Technology Assisted Dietary Assessment (TADA) system through the use of the mobile food record (mFR) app, we recognize the value of having multiple validated tools available to better accommodate diverse research questions, variations due to age or levels of cognition. The Nutrition for Precision Health powered by the All of Us Research Program provides a unique opportunity to test multiple methods of dietary assessment using modern and novel methods. To fully take advantage of this opportunity, we will deploy ASA24 web-based tool; the Mobile Food Record (mFR), an image based app; and a passive method, the Automatic Ingestion Monitor v2 (AIM-2). Further, we will combine methods and include the ASA24 as a dietary record and the ASA24 combined with the mFR. Advancing technology tools would facilitate precision dietary assessment and research translation to better comprehend eating behaviors, define diet-disease relationships, and assess the effectiveness of intervention programs.