Evaluating the healthiness of chain-restaurant menu items using crowdsourcing: a new method.

Objective: To develop a technology-based method for evaluating the nutritional quality of chain-restaurant menus to increase the efficiency and lower the cost of large-scale data analysis of food items.

Design: Using a Modified Nutrient Profiling Index (MNPI), we assessed chain-restaurant items from the MenuStat database with a process involving three steps: (i) testing 'extreme' scores; (ii) crowdsourcing to analyse fruit, nut and vegetable (FNV) amounts; and (iii) analysis of the ambiguous items by a registered dietitian.

Results: In applying the approach to assess 22 422 foods, only 3566 could not be scored automatically based on MenuStat data and required further evaluation to determine healthiness.

Convergent validity of a digital image-based food record to assess food group intake in youth.

Current methods to assess the dietary behavior of youth have many limitations that reduce accuracy. Previous research has examined use of food images to assess nutrient intake. The objectives for this study are to validate the use of a novel digital image-based food record (DIFR) method to assess food group intake in youth and examine inter-analyst reliability.