The 20th century has been accompanied by an important change in epidemiology, namely the continuous decline in deaths from communicable diseases concomitant with the drastic increase in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases (CVD), restrictive respiratory diseases, diabetes, obesity and cancer. Among the factors favoring this explosion of NCDs, we find in particular a sub-optimal diet which can be linked to high blood sugar levels, representing an important risk factor for the development of diabetes as well as metabolic syndrome, which is a predictor for the development of CVD. To avoid a rise in blood sugar levels, it is important to make dietary choices with a normal post-prandial glycemic response (PPGR). To date, there is no good predictor of this PPGR, which has a high inter- individual variability.
The Food and You study with its cohort of people living in Switzerland aims to develop an individualized PPGR prediction algorithm with simple input parameters such as dietary assessment, blood glucose levels and anthropometric measurements as well as microbiome sequencing. Currently, there is no simple and efficient way to assess an individual's precise food intake. The MyFoodRepo application presents an alternative and innovative way to perform dietary assessment by photographing the food consumed or by scanning the barcodes of food and was used as a central data collecting tool in the Food and You study for the first time.
In order to validate the use of MyFoodRepo as a dietary assessment tool, it is useful to evaluate the food consumption of the Food and You cohort and to compare it with the population of Switzerland. The present work focused on the analysis of the data collected by the Food and You study by proposing a Shiny application allowing to visualize the food consumed during a day by 15-minute intervals. In addition, it proposes a comparison of the Food and You cohort populations with the population of the Swiss Health Survey, as well as a comparison of the food consumption of the Food and You subjects with the reference cohort for the population of Switzerland, namely the menuCH study. In order to achieve this goal, the average nutrients and energy in kcal consumed per day were compared with different stratifications.
The results show very similar consumption patterns between the two studies, tending to favor a validation of the dietary assessment method with the MyFoodRepo application. These results are encouraging because this application allows to obtain data with less effort compared to traditional methods such as 24h-dietary recall.