Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Funded under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), Mission 4 Component 2 Investment 1.3, Theme 10.
Translating istat multipurpose survey into a systemic nutrition survey
Coordinator
Unveils the economic determinants of food choice and management focusing both on consumers’ behaviour - also considering the perceived value of food - and on companies’ practices and decision processes.
Aims to widen current knowledge to grasp how dietary choices are affected by social and cultural elements including believes and norms, such as injunctive and subjective norms.
Report on economic determinants of consumers’ sustainable and healthy food choices (M30)
Report on social determinants of consumers’ food management choices (M32)
In Italy, national dietary surveys are not conducted on a regular basis. The interval between surveys is 10 years or more. Up-to-date information on food consumption habits of the general Italian population can be inferred from purchase data or food frequency questionnaires.
In the past, nutrient analysis at national level has used data collected through Household Budget Surveys, as in the DAFNE pan-European food data bank.
The Multipurpose Survey is run by ISTAT on a sample of around 24,000 households every year. It focuses on a large set of daily life issues, including dietary habits and physical activity. Microdata are publicly available from the ISTAT repository.
Within the DEterminants of DIet and Physical ACtivity Knowledge Hub (EU funded project) the opportunity to integrate food frequency data from the ISTAT Multipurpose Survey with information on nutrient intakes from the INRAN-SCAI 2005-06 survey was explored and a mock dataset on derived individual-level food intakes was produced.
The objective of the present project is to refine and systemize the merging procedure in order to produce a reliable original up-to-date dataset on derived individual-level food intakes.
The project will mainly consist in data extraction and data preparation activities with a special focus on the calculation of linking factors to merge the two sources of data (months 1-6). The conversion of individual food frequency data into food and nutrient intake will require specific adjustments to take account of specific needs and to meet the constraints imposed by the characteristics of the Multi-purpose Survey data. A harmonization of food categories with the FoodEx2 classification system will be attempted. A predefined summary measure of overall diet quality based on selected food groups and nutrients will be calculated to monitor overall dietary changes. Validation analyses will follow (months 7-9).
During the last 3 months (10-12) of the project Stata routines will be refined and preliminary analysis on recent patterns of the nutritional status of the Italian population will be run.
The main output of the project will be a derived individual-level food groups and nutrient intake dataset for the Italian population covering the last 20 years, which can serve the research community to explore dietary patterns prevailing in Italy and economic and social determinants of diets. The derived dataset will make it possible to follow the evolution of the eating habits of the Italian population over time and to evaluate the dietary action plans and related strategies implemented at national level.
The dataset will be made publicly available on-line, together with Stata routines for data extraction and calculation of the derived nutrition dataset.
