Maintaining a healthy diet promotes overall health and well-being. How does your dietary pattern compare to national guidelines?
The Dietary Pattern Calculator aims to empower Canadians to improve their health by increasing knowledge of their own dietary patterns. Improving health behaviours, including following a healthy dietary pattern, plays an important role in reducing the risk of chronic diseases. While research has found strong associations between diet patterns and health outcomes, the public’s constant focus on individual nutrients shows a gap in the translation of research findings to practical applications. Although there are screening tools for food groups or nutrients, there are no web- or mobile-based tools for calculating overall dietary pattern scores and their association with disease outcomes. The Project Big Life team developed the web-based Dietary Pattern Calculator to address this gap and is now evaluating and refining the calculator before its public release.
The Dietary Pattern Calculator is a screening tool that provides users with an evidence-based evaluation of the overall healthfulness of their diet. It is a quick and robust assessment of diet quality that focuses on nine food groups, which have been identified to characterize healthy dietary patterns in Canada and provide users with an immediate and personalized score and feedback.
The Calculator is primarily made for healthcare providers and the public. In the clinical setting, healthcare providers can enter simple information and receive real-time output on diet quality, risk of disease, and individualized suggestions. The public can also use the calculator for personal decision-making based on personalized risk scores and recommendations.
The Dietary Pattern Calculator is the first screening tool to provide personalized risk assessment and feedback based on dietary patterns. The calculator also evaluates dietary quality with less participant time burden than most assessment tools while providing evidence-based results from data-driven dietary pattern research.
This research has been supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), a Banting Foundation Discovery Grant, and the TD Better Health program.
