European Food Consumption Validation

EFCOVAL aims at the further development and validation of a trans-European food consumption method to be used for estimation of the intake of foods, nutrients and potentially hazardous chemicals within the European adult population. As recommended by the EFCOSUM consortium, the computerized repeated 24-hour dietary recall method using EPIC-SOFT will be applied as the method for pan-European nutritional surveys to assess intake at an individual level.

Within the project 4 main objectives can be distinguished:

1. To define, test and validate (relatively) a trans-European methodology for undertaking national representative dietary surveys among children, focusing on the age of 4 to 12 years.

2. Adaptation and improvement of the software (EPIC-SOFT). To facilitate the use of the software in all European countries, adaptation of the current version of EPIC-SOFT software to modern IT standards is necessary. For five selected countries, participating in the validation study (see 3), new (n=1) or revised (n=4) versions of EPIC-SOFT will be developed. For other countries best practice for the development of an own national version will be assessed.

3. Validation of the computerized 2x24-hour recall in five selected countries using biomarkers and already existing dietary information. Specific attention will be given to sources of uncertainty and methods will be developed to try quantifying these uncertainties.

4. Improvement of the methodologies to translate the collected food consumption data into the information needed by food policymakers.

DTU Food has the lead f the work package (WP2) investigating objective 1.