BACKGROUND
Dietary management is important for personal health. However, it is challenging to record quantified food information in an efficient, accurate and sustainable manner, particularly for the Chinese food consumptions.
OBJECTIVE
This study aims to develop a dietary management system to record Chinese food information, which can help assessing individuals’ dietary intake and maintaining healthy eating behaviors.
METHODS
In Chinese diets, the foods are usually categorized as staple food (e.g., rice, steamed buns), cooked dish (e.g., cooked tomato with eggs), and soup (e.g., egg drop soup). This study proposed to use the plates embedded with RFID chips to carry Chinese foods and collect the food frequency. Moreover, the food composition and nutrients (carbohydrate, fat, fiber and etc.) were obtained according to the Chinese Recipe Database and China Food Composition Database.
RESULTS
To test the feasibility of the dietary management system, we applied it to collect 489 Chinese foods which were consumed in lunch time across 7 weeks. On basis of one individual’s 20-day food consumption information, we showed that our system supports statistics of the consumed food frequency, overview of the composition of chosen foods, as well as initial indications of nutrient calculation. Given a Chinese dish (e.g., Garlic Puree Cooked Pork Leg), we compared its nutrient values calculated by our method with the results of chemical measurements.
CONCLUSIONS
This preliminary study demonstrated the feasibility of the RFID-based dietary management for Chinese food consumption. In future, the factors (e.g., cuisine method, weight of eaten part, and auxiliary ingredient) will be investigated to improve dietary assessment accuracy.
Corrigendum: A Dietary Assessment Training Course Path: The Italian IV SCAI Study on Children Food Consumption
