Easy Diet Screener: A quick and easy tool for determining dietary patterns associated with lipid profile and body adiposity

Background: There is a lack of simple tools that could allow members of thegeneral population to estimate their own dietary patterns and to associatethem with unfavourable health outcomes. The present study aimed to developand validate a simple self‐administered tool, called the Easy Diet Screener(EDS), that would identify healthy and unhealthy dietary patterns andevaluate their association with unfavourable blood and anthropometricparameters (i.e. values outside the recommended values).
Methods: In total, 259 adult people (31−50 years of age) participated in thisobservational study. They filled out an online version of the EDS ques-tionnaire; those who scored highly were assigned to the healthy dietary pattern(HDP) group, whereas those with a low score were assigned to the westerndietary pattern (WDP) group. The dietary records, anthropometric andbiochemical parameters were evaluated in a subset of 200 participants whoobtained similar score in the repeated EDS (paper version).
Results: People assigned to HDP on the basis of EDS had significantly betterdiet quality than those assigned to WDP, with values of the Healthy EatingIndex being 76.9 ± 9.2 and 58.7 ± 10.5, respectively. People classed as WDPhad a higher risk of too high serum low‐density lipoproteins [odds ratio(OR) = 2.65], triglycerides (OR = 3.67), body mass index (OR = 2.87) andpercentage of fat tissue (OR = 3.98) than did people in the HDP.
Conclusions: EDS is an easy tool for quickly identifying healthy and westerndietary patterns that are associated with lipid profile and body adiposity.