Dazult's Dietary Intake Evaluation Tool, DaDiet, is a web-based software tool that allows accurate estimate of exposure to nutrients and to substances added to foods, including contaminants, food additives and novel ingredients. Used by scientists and regulatory specialists in some of the world's leading food technology, manufacturing and consultancy companies, DaDiet provides easy to use tools to investigate the effect of changes to food compositions on a population's diet.
Dietary assessments involve combining a number of different data sources to estimate the intake of substances in food. Virtually all dietary assessment involve 3 essential data sources:
DaDiet can be used with multi-day 24 hour recalls and multi-day diary based consumption surveys. These dietary data instruments involve the collection of data at the eating event level, typically with food code and the amount of food consumed recorded or estimated. The best example of a multi-day 24 hour recall is the US NHANES WWEIA surveys, while the UK's NDNS is now a 4 day food diary.
In addition to dietary intake records, both 24 hour recalls and food diaries contain data on the subject, including age, gender, bodyweight and statistical weighting. The statistical weighting is used as a measure of how representative that subject is of the total population, given the number of similar subjects within the survey population, while other subject data can be used to filter results and examine subsets of the population.
A person-day is the combination of a subject and the day on which the eat. For example in the 4-day UK survey a subject can be associated with up to 4 "person-days". For most modelling these person-days are treated as being correlated (as you would expect), but for some modelling efforts there are treated as independent (e.g. EFSA's Guidance on the Use of Probabilistic Methodology for Modelling Dietary Exposure to Pesticide Residues)
Food Classification Systems allow foods to be grouped into logical selections. Nearly all surveys come with at least one default food classification system. While these are useful, you will often want to classify foods according to your own needs. This tends to be the most time consuming element of dietary intake and exposure assessments, and DaDiet provides a wizard to simplify the process as much as possible.
Concentration data are used to set the concentrations of substances (including nutrients, contaminants, food additives and novel ingredients) in foods or groups of foods.
Many consumption surveys provide default nutrient data for individual foods consumed in the survey. In DaDiet it is possible to model situations where the nutrient concentration:
Baseline data for concentrations of other substances in foods tend not to be supplied with consumption surveys. In this case DaDiet allows concentrations to be set for substances in food in absolute terms, since there is no baseline for relative changes.
In DaDiet it is possible to run intake assessments using multiple substances at once, e.g. reducing sugar while increasing stevia.
When calculating dietary intakes, DaDiet calculates the dietary intake of various chemicals, ingredients and nutrients for every subject within the survey, as well as recording the food group responsible for each intake. The reporting wizards then uses each subject's statistical weighting to calculate various statistics, including means and percentiles, for the total population, or sub-populations such as age bands or consumers of certain foods. DaDiet also allows for the per subject data to be downloaded, for custom statistical modelling and analysis.
DaDiet's Food Replacement Model allow modification of the original survey in a number of ways:
DaDiet's Ingredients Model enables foods to be broken into their raw ingredients. Substance concentrations can be set in either the raw ingredient or the food as eaten. When the food is eaten in the survey, the concentration of the substance in the food is set by:
In addition to the above models and algorithms, which are available to all DaDiet users, Dazult have developed custom models for users with particular, often project specific, needs.
DaDiet supports probablistic modelling for most of the input variables. The following distributions are available and can used to build custom input data models.
DaDiet version numbering is derived from the year and month of the version release. Release updates are roughly every six months. When referencing DaDiet in your work, we recommend the following:
Dazult Limited. (yyyy). DaDiet - The Dietary Intake Evaluation Tool (Version yy.mm) [Software]. Available from //dadiet.daanalysis.com.
where yyyy is the 4 digit year, yy the two digit year, and mm the two digit month.