Food-based dietary guidelines: some assumptions tested for the Netherlands

Recently, the concept of food-based dietary guidelines has been introduced by WHO and FAO. For this concept, several assumptions were necessary. The validity and potential consequences of some of these assumptions are discussed in this paper on the basis of the Dutch National Food Consumption Surveys. The topics were interrelationships among dietary characteristics, nutrient density, diets in accordance with the guidelines, and food variety. To obtain insight into overall diet quality, a dietary quality index based on nutrients and a food-based quality index based on food groups were created a... Mehr ...