2007
C. Quinio et al.
Published in the European Journal of Nutrition 2007;46(Suppl.2):37-46.
A new EU regulation on nutrition and health claims made on foods has entered into
force in January 2007. The regulation provides for the use of nutrient profiles to determine which foods may bear claims but does not specify what the profiles
should be or how they should be developed. Several nutrient profiling schemes have already been established. Therefore, it is necessary to develop approaches to
test if the existing profiling schemes could fulfil the new regulation needs.
The aim of the present study is to investigate how reference ‘‘indicator foods’’
derived from national dietary surveys in five different countries, are classified according to three existing nutrient profiling schemes: The UK Food Standards
Agency (FSA) model, The Dutch Tripartite classification model and the US FDA model used for regulating health claims. ‘‘Indicator foods’’ that have been shown to be positively or negatively associated with healthy diets in adults in five EU countries were classified according to each of the three profiling schemes. The performance
and effectiveness of each profiling scheme in correctly classifying the ‘‘indicator foods’’ were assessed using sensitivity and specificity ratios. The sensitivity and the specificity ratios of the three profiling schemes tested were relatively good. There were only small differences of performance between the three systems. A significant negative correlation between sensitivity and specificity was observed. The level of concordance between the classification of the ‘‘indicator foods’’ that have been selected because of being positively or negatively associated with a healthy diet and the classification by each of the three profiling methods tested was quite good. However, further improvement of the ‘‘indicator foods’’ approach is needed if it is to serve as a ‘‘gold standard’’.
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