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Dietary Intervention in Primary Care: Validity of the DINE Method for Diet Assessment
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1994
Year
NutritionFamily MedicineDietary Counselling ComponentNutrition LiteracyStructured QuestionnairePublic Health NutritionObesityPrimary CareBody CompositionNutrition EducationPublic HealthHealth EducationDietetics PracticeHealth PolicyNutrition CounsellingHealth PromotionDietetics EducationDietary InterventionDietary TherapyDine MethodMedicineDietary HealthNutrition Assessment
Primary health care staff increasingly provide dietary advice but lack adequate nutrition training, and no brief validated diet assessment methods exist in the UK. The study evaluates the accuracy of the Dietary Instrument for Nutrition Education (DINE) in classifying dietary fat and fibre intakes. The DINE questionnaire, completed in under 10 minutes by primary care staff, was compared to a detailed 4‑day diet record in 206 factory workers. The DINE method achieved 53 % exact agreement for fat and 52 % for fibre, misclassified only 6 % and 5 % respectively, with Pearson correlations of 0.51, 0.46, and 0.43, demonstrating it is a brief and inexpensive tool for diet assessment in primary care.
Primary health care staff are involved increasingly in the provision of dietary advice for health promotion, often without adequate training in nutrition assessment or counselling. At present no brief diet assessment methods are available which have been validated for this purpose in the UK. We report on the accuracy of the Dietary Instrument for Nutrition Education (DINE) in classifying dietary fat and fibre intakes. This structured questionnaire can be administered and scored in under 10 minutes by primary care staff without specialized nutritional knowledge, and includes a dietary counselling component. The classification of fat and fibre intakes as low, medium or high by the DINE method was compared to that of a detailed 4-day diet record in a population of 206 factory workers. There was exact agreement of categorization for 53% of fat intakes and 52% of fibre intakes, and only 6% of fat intakes and 5% of fibre intakes were grossly misclassified (placed in a high category by one method and a low category by another). Pearson correlation coefficients between the two methods were 0.51 for fat, 0.46 for fibre and 0.43 for the polyunsaturated:saturated fat ratio. The DINE method is a brief and inexpensive tool for diet assessment in primary care health promotion programmes.