A Brief Dietary Screening and Counseling Tool for Health Educators

ABSTRACT

Background: Diet quality assessment in community health settings is critical to reduce the incidence and improve management of diet-related chronic disease. Unfortunately, understandable and actionable brief dietary screening tools that empower individuals are nearly absent.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe two rigorous methodological approaches to validate and assess suitability of the Rapid Diet Quality Screener (RDQS).

Methods: The first phase consisted of the content validation of a food consumption frequency questionnaire based on the Alternative Healthy Eating Index (AHEI). The second phase involved evaluating the design of the RDQS using the Suitability Assessment of Materials (SAM).

Results: The RDQS and its food/beverage consumption frequency questions met established validity criteria consistent with the AHEI dietary metric components. The SAM evaluation was superior, thus elevating the RDQS from a one-way process of users assessing their diet quality to a two-way process allowing users to engage in behavior change that positively supports health and well-being.

Translation to Health Education Practice: The RDQS enables health educators to quickly screen an individual’s diet quality to determine risk, guide brief counseling, and monitor progress with the populations they engage.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the following persons for their multiple reviews of the Rapid Diet Quality Screener: Walter Willett, M.D., Dr. P.H., Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and JoAnn Manson, M.D., Dr. P.H., Chief, Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine and the Michael and Lee Professor of Women’s Health, Harvard Medical School.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.