The Food Propensity Questionnaire: Concept, development, and validation for use as a covariate in a model to estimate usual food intake

Objective Twenty-four- hour recalls capture rich information on food consumption, but suffer from inadequately measuring usual intakes of episodically consumed foods. We explore using food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) data as covariates in a statistical model to estimate individual usual intakes of episodically consumed foods and their distributions and describe the development of the Food Propensity Questionnaire, an FFQ introduced in the 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Design We analyzed data from 965 adult participants in the Eating at America's Table Study who completed four 24-hour recalls and an FFQ. We assessed whether or not increasing FFQ-reported frequency was associated with both number of 24-hour recall consumption days and amounts reported. Results For 52 of 56 food groups (93%), and 218 of 230 individual foods (95%), there were significant monotonically increasing relationships between FFQ frequency and 24-hour recall probability of consumption. For 47 of 56 food groups (84%) and 55 of 230 (24%) individual foods, there were significant positive correlations between FFQ frequencies and consumption-day mean intake. Conclusions We found strong and consistent relationships between reported FFQ frequency of food and food-group consumption and probability of consumption on 24-hour recalls. This supports the premise that frequency data may offer important covariate information in supplementing multiple recalls for estimating usual intake of food groups.