2006 Volume 16 Issue 4 Pages 306-312
A new meal menu and intake time-based semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire (MMITQ) was developed. The validity of the MMITQ was assessed a survey on 95 students of a women's junior college by comparing the estimates of intake for several nutrients or six food crowds between the results from MMITQ and a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire (SQFFQ) (the Japanese version used in a cohort study of the Ministry Labour and Welfare).
1) The correlation coefficients (r) (n=95) of several nutrients intake per day between the MMITQ and the SQFFQ were as follow : 0.569 for potassium, 0.501 for calcium, 0.403 for phosphorus, 0.567 for magnesium, 0.574 for iron, 0.457 for copper, 0.654 for carotene, 0.452 for V.D, 0.525 for V.E, and 0.515 for V.C, 0.626 for V.K, 0.412 for polyunsaturated fatty acid, 0.592 for dietary fibre and 0.562 for folic acid showing the rs of 14 nutrients were within the range of 0.4-0.7, As for energy, protein, lipid, carbohydrate, zinc, V.B1, and V.B2, rs were lower than 0.4 (0.23-0.37), although they were still significant (p<0.05).
2) The correlations (n=95) of estimated intake level between MMITQ and SQFFQ for six food crowds were as follows : 0.484 for one first crowd (meat, fish, egg, soybean, and processed soy product), 0.485 for the second crowd (milk and dairy products, fingerling, and alga), 0.547 for the third crowd (green yellow vegetables), 0.563 for the fourth crowd (light color vegetable and fruit), 0.144 for the fifth crowd (cereals, potatoes and sugars), and 0.312 for the sixth crowd (fats and oils, food with a lot of fats).
3) As the validity of several SQFFQs including the SQFFQ used in this study have already been acknowledged, the above results may support the usefulness of the MMITQ for estimating the intake of each nutrient or food group in a person within a field survey.
