Exposure assessment for epidemiology and public health

High quality dietary data collection and advanced data analysis methods, as applied at the Division of Human Nutrition and Health, are crucial for nutritional epidemiology and public health research. Developments in the fields of ICT and ‘omics’, as well as in measurement error theory and statistics, offer opportunities to improve and innovate dietary exposure assessment and can lead to efficient methods that generate valid results with impact on public policy.

There is great need for innovation to make current state-of-the-art dietary assessment future-proof for large scale epidemiological and public health research. Technological innovations have the potential to decrease measurement error and enrich the assessment with information on eating behaviour and the food environment. Diet as a whole should be increasingly studied using multi-dimensional patterns based on arrays of variables with multiple assessment methods, including objective biomarkers of intake. Opportunities should not be missed to integrate these new methods in large studies with concomitantly running validation studies.

Current key projects

Key publications