Discussion focused on the review of dietary screeners, and review of portion sizes.

Office of Dietary Supplements - NIH. Development of common questions for supplement use. Two forms have been developed:

Form A collects more general vitamin and mineral use and non-specific botanicals.

Form B collects specific ranges of nutrient intakes

Copies of both forms are posted on the BCC Nutrition Subcommittee website.

All sites will be polled by Becky Costello, ODS, NIH to determine the content overlap between these forms and possible information collected in their site surveys. A sub-level analysis of supplement use across sites is planned.
 

Review of blood folate sample collection and handling procedures

- Tufts University (Use plain red top tube, no additive)

Review of blood carotenoid sample collection and handling procedures

- University of Illinois - Chicago

Procedures for both have been emailed to sites and will be posted on the website.

Efforts underway to coordinate amongst sites for URI to get a postdoc to help with analysis in year 01, with another site to help in year 02, and in 03.

Year 01 - URI Postdoc - Milena Anatchkova

Years 02-03 - ?

Melina will coordinate between sites shipping dates, packing/labeling used, sample tube selection, etc. She will be contacting each site in the near future. Many thanks to URI for assisting in this effort!

For new fruit and vegetable screeners:

The screener you are using was reported about at the Fourth International Conference on Dietary Assessment Methods, Tucson, AZ, Sept. 20, 2000. The Proceedings of that meeting are being published. So, you can use the following reference:

Performance of two new cognitively enhanced fruit and vegetable short assessment forms (Abstract), F.E. Thompson, A.F. Subar, K. Radimer, A.F. Smith, D. Midthune, S. Rosenfeld, V. Kipnis. Public Health Nutrition (in press).

For percent energy from fat screener:

Thompson, F.E., Kipnis, V., Subar, A.F., Schatzkin, A., Potischman, N., Kahle, L., McNutt, S. (1998). Performance of a short instrument to estimate usual dietary intake of percent calories from fat. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 52(Suppl 2), S63 [Abstract].

Details emailed to the Nutrition Working Group. Information will be posted on the website.
 

Determining relevant essential criteria Stages of Change measures

- fat staging < 30% fat

- fruit and vegetable staging - 3 vegetables, 2 fruits / day

Preliminary discussions started at the January 25-26th BCC meeting. Guidelines were selected as a starting point, since they reflect US Dietary Guidelines and are tangible across most of the research projects with dietary component.

Since food is basically a continuous variable, the thought is to make the criteria more reflective of change in servings consumed per day for fruits and vegetables.

There will be a follow up conference call on this topic for members of BCC Nutrition Working Group and the Transbehavioral Outcomes Assessment Working Group.

Interest expressed in bringing in a nutrition measurement expert to collaborate on this effort.
 

It is not too early to begin the planning process for the joint papers stemming from this topic area. Committee recommends that the sites start thinking about potential collaborative papers. A follow-up conference call will be scheduled to discuss. A statistican will be needed to collaborate across sites in this effort. Recommendations are welcome for a possible candidate.