Nutrition screeners are a great way to obtain a quick snapshot of the adequacy of a particular person’s nutrient or dietary intake.
They can be used in many settings: for weight loss, education, as part of a larger nutrition assessment, or just for fun to figure out how you stack up to recommended intake levels.
Keeping with the Fruits & Veggies – More Matters Month theme for September – there’s a lightning quick Fruit/Vegetable/Fiber Screener from Dr. Gladys Block‘s company NutritionQuest that you should check out and try out for yourself here:
The screener is a validated and abbreviated version of the larger Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) – a dietary intake assessment tool that looks at how often you eat certain foods and then uses that to predict or track certain health outcomes.
In just a few moments, the user can quickly find out if he or she is or is not eating the right amount of fruits and vegetables. It also estimates your average daily grams of fiber intake. Most of us should be getting upwards of 30 grams per day, but the average American eats just 10-12 grams.
If you like that screener – you might also visit the American Heart Association’s Heart Attack Risk Calculator available here. Ignorance may be bliss – but sometimes it also hurts to not know!