Commentary; Snap-N-Send: A Valid and Reliable Method for Assessing the Energy Intake of Elite Adolescent Athletes

Abstract

Diet is an ever-changing, poorly characterised and multifaceted phenomenon. Consequently, traditional dietary assessment methods demonstrate considerable random intra- and inter-individual day-to-day variation and systematic over- or under-reporting bias (errors of reliability and validity; Beaton et al. 1997; Freedman et al. 2015) across populations (Pérez-Rodrigo et al. 2015). Expressed practically, true assessments of energy intake are misrepresented by hundreds of calories per day (Archer et al. 2016), erroneously informing medical conclusions (Schoenfeld & Ioannidis 2013), media claims (Archer, Pavela & Lavie 2015) and national dietary guidelines (Chowdhury et al. 2014). Ultimately, the enormous potential of nutrition research to drive national health, patient welfare and public service (Dhurandhar et al. 2015), urgently necessitates, and ethically obligates, the valid assessment of diet within all dietetic output