Abstract

A study was performed to develop as a screening tool, the Simple Evaluation Questionnaire for screening Overweight Dietary Patterns in people in their 20's. We used the data from the 20 to 29 year old subjects who participated in the three surveys: the health behavior survey, the dietary habit survey and the food intake survey - as part of the National Health and Nutrition Survey of 1998. The 1,493 adults were classified into two body fatness groups, that of normal (including the underweight), and the overweight (including the obese) on the basis of their relative body weight (RBW). When comparing general variables between the two groups, significant differences (11 variables) were found in gender, sadness/depression state, stress level, age, number of diseases, age when overweightedness started, maximum body weight, sleep length, presently a smoker, everyday smoking habits, number of alcoholic drinks in the past month, and the number of alcoholic drinks when drunk, as well as snacking frequency and fatty food consumption. There were significant differences between the two groups in the three variables of daily soup/kuk, pan fried fish/meat/poultry and cooked fish paste/ham/dried squid in terms of cooked food intake, and 11 variables of food size, cooked rice, stews, vegetables and kimchi at breakfast, panfried foods and beverage/teas at lunch, cooked rice and stews (liquid) at dinner, cooked fish paste/ham/dried squid at snacks and cooked fishpaste/ham/dried squid at snack between lunch and dinner. In terms of raw food intake, we observed significant differences (8 variables) in daily food intake and grains, grains/vegetables/fishes (shellfish) at breakfast, meat at lunch and milk at snack after dinner. After developing questions with indicators and analyzing the indicators by logistic regression analysis using 34 variables, including these 33, plus eating-out frequency, we chose 10 questions for the simple evaluation of dietary patterns for the overweight category, in order to give each one point each. Among them we assigned an additional point to one question and two points to another question. The average scores of the overweight and normal groups, as shown by the questionnaire developed, were 5.97 +/- 2.36 and 7.36 +/- 2.21, respectively. A score of seven points was selected as the cut-off point. We examined the sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value of the questionnaire to the results of 49.3%, 75.4% and 68.8%, respectively. The total score categorized as an overweight dietary pattern was 30.2%.

• Keywords: overweight; dietary pattern; simple evaluation; questionnaire; young adult