Principles of Nutritional Assessment

The Second Edition covers advances made in a wide range of research, such as the numerous multicenter studies highlighting the role of diet in health and chronic diseases; technical improvements in the measurement of food and nutrient intakes, including the use of independent biomarkers; reliable ways to evaluate the adequacy of nutrient intakes at both the individual and population levels using newly defined multiple nutrient-based levels; recognition of widespread underreporting in food consumption studies; the emergence of obesity and overweight in national nutrition surveys as the major nutritional problems in many industrialized and other countries; and much greater understanding of the nutritional role of iron, vitamin A, iodine, and zinc. An important development in recent years has been the growing awareness that micronutrient deficiencies rarely occur in isolation, that their interaction can lead to multiple clinical signs and symptoms that are difficult to interpret, and that to identify such deficits requires a combination of sensitive and specific biochemical and functional laboratory tests.