Dietary intake data: usefulness and limitations.

In past decades, the main objectives of nutrition surveys were to define nutritional status at the time of the study, to cross-sectionally describe dietary patterns of consumption and food preparation practices, and to identify areas for improvement. Nowadays, the need for ongoing evaluation of nutritional status of individuals and of population is gaining recognition. The present paper, in discussing usefulness and limitations of dietary intake data, will focus on the importance of considering nutrition as a component of overall quality of life as well as a discipline that gains to be integrated to other disciplinary fields such as medicine, biochemistry, immunology, anthropometry and agribusiness. In this respect, the present paper will discuss the methodology of dietary data collection, the various uses of dietary data collected at the individual, community and general population levels and finally will try to define new vistas in regard to emphasis and tools for future dietary intake studies.