title: qDIET: toward an automated, self-sustaining knowledge base to facilitate linking point-of-sale grocery items to nutritional content.
abstract: The United States, indeed the world, struggles with a serious obesity epidemic. The costs of this epidemic in terms of healthcare dollar expenditures and human morbidity/mortality are staggering. Surprisingly, clinicians are ill-equipped in general to advise patients on effective, longitudinal weight loss strategies. We argue that one factor hindering clinicians and patients in effective shared decision-making about weight loss is the absence of a metric that can be reasoned about and monitored over time, as clinicians do routinely with, say, serum lipid levels or HgA1C. We propose that a dietary quality measure championed by the USDA and NCI, the HEI-2005/2010, is an ideal metric for this purpose. We describe a new tool, the quality Dietary Information Extraction Tool (qDIET), which is a step toward an automated, self-sustaining process that can link retail grocery purchase data to the appropriate USDA databases to permit the calculation of the HEI-2005/2010.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT;
authors.forename: Valliammai
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Chidambaram
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT;
authors.forename: Philip J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Brewster
authors.affiliation: Division of Nutrition, College of Health, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Kristine C
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Jordan
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT;
authors.forename: John F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Hurdle
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D003132:Commerce; D016208:Databases, Factual; D004032:Diet; D015930:Diet Records; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D009753:Nutritive Value; D009765:Obesity / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology