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Dietary Assessment & Further Development of Biomarkers for All

There is a need for advancement in harmonised dietary assessment technologies supported by objective biomarker measurements for food and nutrient intakes. While many tools have been developed with specific purposes, a tool which encompasses the requirements of the EU research community to allow for harmonisation of data collection, analysis and sharing and also to enable compilation of data crosscountries to provide greater public health/epidemiological evidence for the role of diet in health and disease is still needed. The objective of this project is to develop an open source researcher-led dietary assessment tool with machine learning capabilities for automatic classification for harmonisation of dietary data across Europe and to advance on-going biomarker research in the area of nutritional status and health. Specifically, this project will develop an open source dietary assessment tool which addresses the needs for research related to epidemiology, clinical practice and for dietary surveillance with regards to both nutrition and food safety aspects. An important aspect of this project will be the involvement of end users and stakeholders from the design through to the acceptability phase. This project will also investigate factors potentially influencing the validity of dietary biomarkers (genetics, lifestyle, phenotype, other dietary factors) using existing cohort studies and estimate impact of biomarker corrections on estimation of food/nutrient intakes. A pilot study will be performed to compare the newly developed 24- hour dietary recall tool with traditional measurements of food intake and to validate the level of agreement/concordance between the dietary intake data and metabolic and genetic biomarkers in the field of precision nutrition related with food consumption. The resulting dietary assessment tool and biomarker knowledge generated will allow comparisons between different populations, identify specific atrisk groups/individuals to target in interventions. The outputs of this project have the potential for commercial applications wider than this proposal. This project will be carried out by an expert multidisciplinary team with extensive experience in dietary assessment and biomarker research allowing the synergistic advancement of research related to diet and health.