Paper of the month: Slow pace of dietary change in Scotland

The original call for the work described in this paper came from the Working Group convened by the Food Standards Agency Scotland and the Scottish Executive in 2004 to investigate how to assess progress towards the Scottish Dietary Targets (Table 1). These targets had been formulated in 1996 but there had been no attempt to monitor progress. The group was faced with the fact that whilst Scotland had dietary targets we were unlikely to know if we had reached them unless we could utilise robust survey data. Reviews were commissioned to see what was available and 4 possibilities were noted (Table 2). The full report of the Working Group on Monitoring Scottish Dietary Targets can be found online but in essence they concluded that ‘There is no single existing survey that addresses the Scottish Dietary targets’ and ‘The Expenditure and Food Survey should be used to monitor progress towards the Scottish Dietary Targets in 2005 and beyond.’ The food categories reported in the Expenditure and Food Survey (EFS) did not match the dietary targets exactly and it was decided that we needed to go back to the original data to estimate the intakes of the foods and nutrients relevant to the targets. As the survey (and its successor the Living Costs and Food Survey) is a household purchase survey the calculation methods needed to include factors for waste, proportion of composite foods and take account of cooking and preservation methods. In addition, there was a need to look at...
Source: The Nutrition Society - Category: Nutrition Authors: Source Type: news