Short communication: a food-systems approach to assessing dairy product waste.

Concern about world population increase, food security, and the environmental burdens of food production have made food-waste reduction a social and environmental priority. In this context, the quantification of dairy product waste is especially difficult due to the varied means of disposal, by solid and liquid waste streams, and due to inclusion as an ingredient in many processed foods. In this study, food intake data from the Australian National Nutrition Survey (>13,000 participants; >4,500 food items) were disaggregated into basic foods and total national dairy product intake was expressed in whole-milk equivalents. This result was compared with total domestic milk supply, indicating a level of waste of 29% for dairy products in the Australian food system. With national food-waste reduction targets becoming increasingly common, reliable estimates of food waste at the national scale are important for goal setting, baseline reporting, and performance monitoring. For this purpose, the systems approach to assessing food waste demonstrated in this project is deemed to have advantages over other common methods of food-waste assessment, such as bin audits, waste diaries, and surveys.

Estimating food intakes in Australia: validation of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) food frequency questionnaire against weighed dietary intakes.

BACKGROUND: There is a dearth of knowledge about the foods that Australian adults eat and a need for a flexible, easy-to-use tool that can estimate usual dietary intakes. The present study was to validate a commonly used Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) food-frequency questionnaire (C-FFQ) against two 4-day weighed food records (WFR), as the reference method. METHODS: The C-FFQ, as the test item, was administrated before the WFR. Two 4-day WFR were administrated 4 weeks apart. Under-reporting was established using specific cut-off limits and estimated basal metabolic rate. Seventy-four women, aged 31-60 years, were enrolled from a free-living community setting. RESULTS: After exclusion for under-reporting, the final sample comprised 62 individuals. Correlations between protein intake from the WFR and urinary urea were significant. Overall agreement between FFQ and WFR was shown by 'levels of agreement' (LOA) and least products regressions. There was presence of fixed and proportional bias for almost half the nutrients, including energy, protein, fat and carbohydrates. For most of the nutrients that did not present bias, the LOA were 50-200%. Agreement was demonstrated for percentage dietary energy protein and fat; carbohydrate; and absolute amounts of thiamine, riboflavin, magnesium and iron. However, relative intake agreement was fair to moderate, with approximately 70% of (selected) nutrients exact or within +/-1 quintile difference. CONCLUSION: The C-FFQ is reasonable at measuring percentage energy from macronutrients and some micronutrients, and comprises a valuable tool for ranking intakes by quintiles; however, it is poor at measuring many absolute nutrient intakes relative to WFR.

Diet, prolactin, and breast cancer.

Relationships between dietary nutrients and plasma prolactin concentration were studied in 249 women with a history of nonskin cancers among first-degree female relatives. For each quintile of nutrient density, the odds ratio (OR), relative to the lowest quintile, of having an elevated (above the median) prolactin concentration was estimated by logistic regression, taking into account parity, menopausal status, and current tobacco-smoking habits. For nutrient densities estimated from 24-h recall data there was a significant positive association between plasma prolactin concentration and increasing saturated fatty acid intake; the OR of elevated prolactin in the top quintile was 3.1 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1.2-8.1] and there was a negative association with vitamin C [OR in the top quintile 0.28, (95% CI 0.10-0.78)]. For usual nutrient densities (estimated by quantitative food frequency questionnaire) there was a statistically significant trend (P = 0.04) toward lower prolactin concentrations with increasing sodium density, and a marginally significant positive trend (P = 0.07) with increasing dietary density of refined sugars.

Sociodemographic determinants in Australia of the intake of food and nutrients implicated in cancer aetiology.

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the role that diet can play in the promotion, retardation or amelioration of the cancer process. This has led to the development of dietary guidelines for cancer prevention by health authorities in several Western societies. However, there is still limited information about the sociodemographic determinants of intake of foods and nutrients of interest in many of these countries. A study of the dietary intake of a random sample of residents of the State of Victoria in Australia showed that women, those in the older age groups and in the higher occupational ranks, had diets more in line with current recommendations for cancer prevention--the most marked differences being between men and women. However, the sociodemographic differences were relatively small compared with the low rate of overall compliance with the guidelines.

Intakes and sources of a range of dietary sugars in various Australian populations.

Data from the Apparent Consumption of Foodstuffs publications of the Australian Bureau of Statistics have, until recently, been the major source of information in Australia about the consumption of refined sugars. This database, which relies on national figures for production, importation, export, storage and stocks, and on population statistics, had indicated that some 14% of the total energy that was available in Australia was derived from refined sugars. Similar figures have been derived for both the United States and United Kingdom by means of this kind of national food-availability database. However, a recent reanalysis of a large-scale dietary survey of individuals in the United States has indicated a much lower level of consumption of refined sugars. In recent years, several large-scale surveys of individuals' consumption patterns in the Australian population have been carried out by the Social Nutrition Program at the CSIRO Division of Human Nutrition. These surveys indicate that the mean level of consumption of refined sugars is not as high as that which previously was estimated from Apparent Consumption data. However, there was a wide range of intakes and a substantial proportion of individuals with intakes that were above recommended levels.