Nutrition

Objective: This paper describes the development of a reliable and valid questionnaire to provide a comprehensive measure of the nutritional knowledge of UK adults. The instrument will help to identify areas of weakness in people’s understanding of healthy eating and will also provide useful data for examining the relationship between nutrition knowledge and dietary behaviour which, up until now, has been far from clear.

Design: Items were generated paying particular attention to content validity. The initial version of the questionnaire was piloted and assessed on psychometric criteria. Items which did not reach acceptable validity were excluded, and the final 50 item version was administered to two groups differing in nutritional expertise on two occasions to assess the construct validity and test-retest reliability.

Setting: The questionnaire was developed in 1994 in the UK.

Since the 1950s the link between diet and chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disorders has been increasingly well recognised world-wide (WHO, 1990). In the UK, attempts to improve the nation’s health through dietary change have tended to centre around education. Underlying this approach is the assumption that providing people with the information necessary to choose healthy foods will ultimately lead to an improvement in diet. According to this view, given accurate information about what they should be eating and the implications for their health if they eat the `wrong’ foods, people will change their diets appropriately. Organisations like the Health Education Authority in the UK produce extensive literature aimed at informing people about appropriate dietary behaviour.