A Narrative Review of Dietary Assessment Tools for Preschool-Aged Children in the Home Environment

Abstract

Preschool-aged children in the U.S. have suboptimal diets. Interventions to improve child nutrition focus on parents and their role in shaping social and physical home environments, which influence children’s eating behaviors. Dietary assessment tools selected to measure intervention objectives, and how results are interpreted in key findings, are essential when examining children’s diets. The objectives of this review were to (1) describe dietary assessment tools used in intervention studies in young children focused within the home environment; and (2) examine how the application of these dietary assessment tools addressed intervention objectives. PubMed and Web of Science were searched for English-language nutrition intervention studies that included children aged 2–5 years, had a home environment component, used a dietary assessment tool, and reported on diet-related outcomes. Seventeen studies were included. Intervention objectives focused on overall diet, specific food groups, eating occasions, and obesity prevention/treatment. Concordance of key findings with intervention objectives, type of tool used, and multiple tools within the same study varied with 8 studies aligning in objective and tool, 1 discordant in both, and 8 partially concordant or too broad to determine. This review highlights current challenges in measuring dietary intake in preschoolers and provides recommendations for alternative applications and strategies.