Nutritional Epidemiological Study to Estimate Usual Intake and to Define Optimum Nutrient Profiling Choice in the Diet of Egyptian Youths

Abstract

Objectives: To define optimum food and nutrient profiling in gender-specific and age group-specific variant regression models. Setting: 481 subjects of both sexes (18.4 years old) from Giza urban were set. Design: Dietary assessment used the 24-h dietary recall data to calculate the estimated energy and (24) nutrients eaten by each individual. Four indices—food variety diversity score, healthy eating index (HEI), mean probability of nutrients adequacy (MPA) and nutrient rich food (NRF 9.3 ) index score were used for assessing the profiling of the diet. Results: A total of 163 individual food items were consumed by the participants within the 24-h dietary recall with an average daily intake of (6.6) different food varieties. Grains were the top contributors of energy and 10 macro and micro nutrients followed by the meat group. Based on the MPA data, the mean acceptable intake (AI) of dietary calcium (32.9%) and vitamin C (30%) were limiting in the diet. The diet profiling consumed by the teenagers aged 14.8 years was inferior compared to that consumed by subjects aging 23.9 years. Linear regression analyses were conducted between the 4 indices as the dependent variable and all possible combinations of 16 nutrients of interest as independent variables. NRF 9.3 was the optimum nutrient index and correlated negatively with markers of abdominal obesity. Conclusion: Implementation of nutrition intervention program was directed to youths to include age appropriate good healthy foods to decrease the risk of nutrient deficiencies.