Validation of a Mediterranean Diet Scoring System for Intervention Based Research

Abstract

Background: A Mediterranean diet pattern is cardioprotective and positively correlated with lower chronic disease risk. Certain vulnerable populations would benefit greatly from a Mediterranean diet to reduce cardiovascular disease risk, and clinical diet intervention research typically uses diet recall questionnaires. This type of dietary tracking leads to assumptions and not an actual ability to accurately track Mediterranean diet adherence in the short-term. Objective: Thus, the purpose of this study is to test the validity of a new Mediterranean diet scoring system (MDSS) which scores diets on a weekly basis based on serving numbers within food groups. Results: We evaluated the validity of this new MDSS to another well-established system. We analyzed 354 weeks of diet using both the new and old MDSSs, performing analysis on the specificity and sensitivity of the new MDSS to the established MDSS. Conclusion: We found that an a priori defined adherence value of 70% using the new MDSS was both specific and sensitive to the established MDSS, comparable to other studies. In sum, this new MDSS is effective at measuring adherence to a Mediterranean diet weekly and warrants use in future studies, especially intervention-based research.