Simple is good enough: Evaluation of the Diet Quality Questionnaire to estimate diet quality at population level in low- and middle-income countries

Summary

Traditional dietary assessment methods are often too expensive to implement at large scale in resource-limited settings, hampering population-level monitoring of diets particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). A lack of feasible and valid methods to monitor diets of populations result in a gap of dietary intake data, globally. Monitoring diets is important to design effective programs toward healthy diets, and track progress for achieving healthy diets for everyone. The DQQ is a simple, low-cost, and feasible dietary assessment method designed to monitor population-level diets among adolescents aged 15 years and above and among adults, and is already implemented for this purpose around the world, particularly in LMICs. This thesis shows that DQQ is a valid and reproducible tool to estimate population-level diet quality among female adults, and provides evidence of its validity among male adults and adolescents in LMICs. The tool offers a practical way to enable global monitoring of diets.