Frontiers | FoodRepo: An Open Food Repository of Barcoded Food Products | Nutrition

"Metabolic disorders, such as diabetes or obesity, have become a major public health concern, with increasingly large parts of the global population affected (1, 2). Nutritional epidemiologists hope to better understand the underlying causes, the potential treatments and prevention strategies by analyzing population and individual patterns through studies that generally rely on surveying dietary habits. Traditional food-intake survey methods are based on questionnaires filled by participants at a given frequency. The frequency of diet records is an important factor contributing to the accuracy of the study (3). Multiple-day diet records might provide good accuracy when not based on memory, but require strong motivation and time commitment by the participants. Approaches like multiple/single 24-h recalls—involving a specialized interviewer performing surveys in person or on the phone with the participants—require less engagement, but pose issues with missing data as they rely on short-term memory. Finally, so-called Food Frequency Questionnaires, where participants are asked to indicate the frequency of intake of certain foods over long periods of time (typically 1 year), demand minimal participants' commitment, therefore allowing for large cohort studies on long-term dietary habits. However, the likelihood of missing or incorrect data increases as they count on participants' long-term memory. Overall, self-reported dietary data present biases which limit their applications, especially when they heavily rely on participants' memory (4). Such limitations, which should be properly addressed in further epidemiological studies, may be overcome with more advanced recording methodologies such as dietary biomarkers and digital technologies (5)...."

Gianrocco Lazzari, Yannis Jaquet, Djilani J. Kebaili, Laura Symul and Marcel Salathé*