165-item FFQ®

The 165-itemFFQ® is an advanced, semi-quantitative tool that allows an assessment of the frequency of food consumption (times/person/day) and the amount (g/person/day) of food typically consumed throughout the year, and also . Finally, it allows for a comprehensive, quantitative assessment of the quality of customary diet, including energy and nutritional value.

The questionnaire is prepared in a version administered by the interviewer-researcher and should not be completed by the respondent independently because it is long.

The main part of the 165-itemFFQ® contains questions about the usual frequency of consumption of 165 food items and their quantity. The frequency of food items consumption is determined by respondents by freely indicating the usual frequency of consumption during the day, week, month, and year (open-ended questions). The respondents determine the amount of food items eaten based on photos from the "Album of Photos of Products and Dishes" [Szponar et al., 2000], and the interviewer-researcher records it in grams or pieces (eggs).

The list of foods and their division into 165 food items was developed based on: • analysis of the structure of food consumption by Poles, • own research on food consumption, • pilot studies, • comprehensive review of the literature on the construction and validation of nutritional questionnaires.

For further analysis of the diet, food items can be combined into smaller groups (usually 44), which makes it easier to isolate specific eating habits later (e.g. dietary patterns). An integral part of the 165-itemFFQ® are questions about eating habits, including frequency of meals and snacks between main meals.

For 165-itemFFQ®, a procedure was developed to estimate the energy and nutritional value of the usual diet, and the results obtained using 165-itemFFQ® were compared with the results obtained using the 3-day food record method [Kowalkowska et al. 2013].

An interesting application of the 165-itemFFQ® in an assessment of the nutrition and health of adolescents was described by Długosz [2017].