DIETARY INTERVENTION IN PRIMARY-CARE - VALIDITY OF THE DINE METHOD FOR DIET ASSESSMENT

Primary health care staff are involved increasingly in the provision o f dietary advice for health promotion, often without adequate training in nutrition assessment or counselling. At present no brief diet asse ssment methods are available which have been validated for this purpos e in the UK. We report on the accuracy of the Dietary Instrument for N utrition Education (DINE) in classifying dietary fat and fibre intakes . This structured questionnaire can be administered and scored in unde r 10 minutes by primary care staff without specialized nutritional kno wledge, and includes a dietary counselling component. The classificati on of fat and fibre intakes as low, medium or high by the DINE method was compared to that of a detailed 4-day diet record in a population o f 206 factory workers. There was exact agreement of categorization for 53% of fat intakes and 52% of fibre intakes, and only 6% of fat intak es and 5% of fibre intakes were grossly misclassified (placed in a hig h category by one method and a low category by another). Pearson corre lation coefficients between the two methods were 0.51 for fat, 0.46 fo r fibre and 0.43 for the polyunsaturated: saturated fat ratio. The DIN E method is a brief and inexpensive tool for diet assessment in primar y care health promotion programmes.