Profiles of a Healthful Diet and its Relationship to Biomarkers in a Population Sample from Mediterranean Southern France
Section snippets
Subjects
Subjects were a subgroup of a larger sample (967 subjects) randomly recruited in Mediterranean southern France (Hérault département) for a nutrition survey (14). The subsample consisted of 150 volunteers who agreed to have blood drawn. One subject was excluded because of outlier biological measurements and 3 subjects were excluded because they underreported energy intake. Underreporting was estimated taking physical activity into consideration. Energy expenditure related to physical activity
Results
The distribution of scores in our sample with the corresponding median values of biomarkers is given in Table 2. Plasma cholesterol level was not a biomarker of a healthful diet: plasma cholesterol concentration decreased only with an increased intake of cereal. In contrast, the other biomarkers varied inversely to the scores for most items. Computation of the DQI showed that only 10 subjects qualified for a healthful diet (scores 1 to 4), except for 2 items, cereals and meats, which did not
Discussion
Two aspects of our study bring new insights to the way of capturing multidimensional food behavior. One is construction of the DQI, which differed somewhat from previously reported instruments (10), (11), (12), (13) all of which were developed with north European or North American populations. The recommendation for intake of less than 30% of energy from fat did not permit a good classification of our subjects. The mean percentage of fat in the energy intake of our population is 38±7%, but
Applications/Conclusions
Fat intake cannot be considered as a whole when evaluating diet quality because some fatty acids appear to be risk factors for chronic degenerative diseases whereas others (or their food sources) seem to reduce the risk. Individuals with alpha-carotene + beta carotene levels greater than 1 micromol/L, vitamin E greater than 30 micromol/L and EPA greater than 0.65% and DHA greater than 4% of fatty acids in erythrocytes are likely to have a healthful diet. Diet might only influence high levels of
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2013, Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS CareCitation Excerpt :Nutritional biomarkers, such as serum phospholipid fatty acids have been used to validate self-report of food diaries, food frequency questionnaires, and 24-hour dietary recall (McKeown et al., 2001; Parra et al., 2002). Biomarkers for fish oil are recognized as important components to validate dietary intake (Gerber et al., 2000). Serum phospholipids were used to evaluate fish oil consumption based on the average level of EPA/DHA provided by the study.
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