Foods that we eat and their relationship to health

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Food history questionnaires

    A lot of nutrition research is done through the use of the food history questionnaire. This is different from food recalls in that it is shorter, easier to administer and does not require special interviewing skills. Sometimes studies need to identify patterns of food consumption in a large population. This is done, for instance, as…

  • Questionnaire concepts

    A subject’s nutrient profile, whether obtained from food recall information or from food history (questionnaire) information, is obtained by a simple arithmetic calculation. Each nutrient is the product of the food quantity consumed and the nutrient’s concentration in that food. The subject’s consumption is the sum of these products over the foods consumed in one…

  • Food frequency questionnaires

    Sometimes studies need to identify patterns of food consumption in a large population. This is done, for instance, as part of a general population health survey. These are done on a fairly regular basis, usually funded by governments, to be proactive in the formulation of heath related polices. This saves our tax money in the…

  • SPSS or SAS or PSPP or … and CANDAT

    SPSS, SAS  (or other good statistical packages) is used to process Candat calculations into results for your scientific report. At its most detailed Candat will produce data files consisting of: Subject code Date Day of Week code (0-6, where 0 is Sunday) Food Group code Meal code Food code Food description Nutrient variables (Weight of…

  • Week-weighted Averages in CANDAT

    When expressing and comparing results of multi-day (3 day commonly) food recalls one tends to use the average daily intake as a measure of a subject’s intake. Of course, 7 day recalls will give more accurate estimates of this daily intake and the accuracy will increase if all the days of a week are used.…

  • Course & Documentation

    Please follow the outline in the column on the right to navigate through food research techniques and documentation on using Candat with those techniques. Please enjoy the site and all its information.

  • Recipes & CANDAT

    Recipes are another source of food information. Not all foods can be found in food databases, There is a limitless number of recipes and thus a limitless number of foods. You only need to look at the number of recipe books that are available to have an idea of the number of foods that are…

  • Task 400 – Recipe Maintenance

    This task begins by prompting for the file name. Files that exist already will be listed and the one desired selected. If the new… choice is selected a new file name needs to be entered. New file names must start with a letter, have no spaces within the name and have 8 characters (letters or…

  • Recipe – Validation

    One of the purposes of creating recipes is to be able to calculate their nutrient profile. If you were doing this manually you would look for the nutrient profile of each ingredient and sum each ingredient’s nutrient contribution. From this you would get an estimate of the recipe’s nutrient profile. Validating a recipe is a…

  • Recipe – management

    A database of recipes needs to be managed. Management means the following: Being able to list the recipes (simple code and description only) Being able to list the recipes with contents. This allows verification of information entered to ensure accuracy Being able to copy recipes to other recipe databases to save re-entry Being able to…

  • Recipe – Input

    There is more to recipe input than just entering the ingredients and their quantities. Below is a list of requirements to define recipes. (R) indicates a required item, (O) indicates an optional item but useful if you are going to be creating a large collection of recipes for many purposes. (R) A recipe database. If…

  • First Nations Food, Nutrition and Environment Study

    We are a multi-organization research team (University of Northern British Columbia, University of Ottawa, Université de Montréal, Assembly of First Nations and Health Canada) that has used CANDAT since 2008. So far, we have used CANDAT to enter over 5000 single and repeated recalls. The software is easy to learn and use. One of our…

  • University of Guelph

    I have used Candat for many years for the analysis of 24 hour recall data, and for the development and subsequent analysis of food frequency questionnaires for two different studies. The range of analytic options provided by Candat, and the fact that it is based on the latest version of the Canadian Nutrient File, are…

  • University of PEI

    CANDAT is superior to other nutrient analysis programs because it is designed to accommodate the diverse needs of researchers. Being able to handle food recalls and records and food frequency questionnaires in the same program, to create user files of special food items not included in the CNF and to easily import files into statistical…

  • McGill University

    We use CANDAT because it is the best software giving access to the Canadian Nutrient File (CNF) that we have been able to find. It allows us to structure our data to provide the results that we need. For example, we have made consistent use of the food grouping capability that provides us with nutrients…

  • Essential CANDAT information

    This section explains the CANDAT software environment. You need to have a feeling for the following three areas: CANDAT Environment (GRASP) GRASP (General Reporting and Application Support Package) is an environment which contains standard mechanisms for communicating between the user and the computer. This allows for consistency within applications and is the background within which…

  • Introduction

    This section shows you how to install CANDAT and the first steps to actually using it. For more information please use the contact us link on this website.

  • Preface

    These links give you some background on CANDAT and a bit of an idea as to how you should publish your findings.

  • Publications

    Please refer to the links below for more information.

  • Hello world!

    Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

Got any book recommendations?