Abstract
Background: With the right nutritional strategies, athletes can optimise training benefits, maximize competition performance and accomplish peak sporting achievements. Before effective nutrition strategies can be undertaken, the sports dietitian needs to obtain an accurate picture of the athlete’s current dietary intake. The Easy Diet Diary (EDD), an iPhone application, is an electronic dietary assessment tool. Sports dietitians may prefer to use the EDD, rather than a weighed diet record (WDR), when recording dietary intakes with their athletes. This is mainly due to the potential of reducing respondent burden. However, the EDD’s accuracy in estimating energy and macronutrient intakes, in the athlete population, has yet to be determined.
Objective: The objectives were to: 1) determine the level of agreement between the EDD and WDR for estimating four-day average energy and macronutrient intakes, in high-energy consuming male athletes; and 2) investigate whether the EDD is a feasible app for athletes to record their dietary intake.
Design: Fifty-three male athletes from the Auckland and Otago region completed this relative validity study. Participants recorded their dietary intake over four self-selected days using the EDD app. At least two weeks later, participants recorded their dietary intake for another four days by weighing all food, beverages and supplements, and recording in a WDR. To obtain any missing, or clarify, dietary information all participants were followed up after the EDD and WDR phase, and diet records were adjusted where necessary. To determine EDD’s accuracy, dietary data from the EDD was compared against dietary data from the ‘gold standard’ WDR before (EDD raw) and after (EDD adjusted) dietitian adjustments.
Results: There were no statistically significant differences in the mean daily energy, protein, fat and carbohydrate intakes estimated between the EDD adjusted and WDR adjusted (p =>0.05). Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) showed reasonable to good agreement for energy (0.62), protein (0.82), and carbohydrate (0.76) at the individual level, but poor agreement for fat (0.31). Between the EDD raw and WDR adjusted, statistically significant differences were present for energy (-961kJ, p = 0.047) and carbohydrate (-38g, p = 0.01). ICCs showed reasonable agreement for protein (0.74) and carbohydrate (0.65), but at a lower agreement compared to EDD adjusted, reported above. Poor agreement was seen for both energy (0.48) and fat (0.30) at the individual level. The majority of participants thought the EDD was easy to use and preferred recording their intake via the app to the WDR (98% and 96% respectively).
Conclusion: Following dietitian consultation and adjustment, the EDD is a valid method for estimating average energy and macronutrient intakes in this high-energy consuming male athlete population, and for estimating four-day energy, protein and carbohydrate intakes at the individual level. Without dietitian input, EDD is a valid method for estimating protein intake. However, it significantly underestimated energy and carbohydrate intakes at the group level, and poorly estimated energy and fat intakes at the individual level. This study concludes that the EDD is an acceptable method amongst male athletes for recording four-days of their dietary intake. However, we are mindful that dietetic consultation and adjustment is necessary for accurate dietary assessment in high-energy consuming male athletes when using the EDD.