New Exponential Scoring Functions for Diet Quality Indexes Solve Problems Caused by Truncation.

Background: Diet quality indexes, including the Healthy Eating Index, assess diets based on usual dietary intakes and a scoring function. Nearly all diet quality indexes use scoring functions that have floors and ceilings, thereby truncating the scores and losing information about intakes outside the scoring range. This score truncation has 2 important impacts: 1) the index does not reflect all intakes; and 2) the assumption that measurement error in intake reporting has a neutral impact on the diet quality score cannot be upheld.

New Exponential Scoring Functions for Diet Quality Indexes Solve Problems Caused by Truncation.

Background: Diet quality indexes, including the Healthy Eating Index, assess diets based on usual dietary intakes and a scoring function. Nearly all diet quality indexes use scoring functions that have floors and ceilings, thereby truncating the scores and losing information about intakes outside the scoring range. This score truncation has 2 important impacts: 1) the index does not reflect all intakes; and 2) the assumption that measurement error in intake reporting has a neutral impact on the diet quality score cannot be upheld.