Not the Time to Abandon the Food Frequency Questionnaire: Point

Not the time to abandon the food frequency questionnaire: counterpoint.

Virtually all epidemiologists (including us) who have investigated relationships between diet and chronic disease in the past 20 years have used food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) to assess diet and will continue to publish findings based on FFQ-derived data. However, in our editorial ‘‘Is it Time to Abandon the Food Frequency Questionnaire,’’ we addressed how we should conduct epidemiologic s...

Point/Counterpoint Not the Time to Abandon the Food Frequency Questionnaire: Counterpoint

Virtually all epidemiologists (including us) who have investigated relationships between diet and chronic disease in the past 20 years have used food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) to assess diet and will continue to publish findings based on FFQ-derived data. However, in our editorial ‘‘Is it Time to Abandon the Food Frequency Questionnaire,’’ we addressed how we should conduct epidemiologic s...

Is it time to abandon the food frequency questionnaire?

Although painful to admit, it is possible that epidemiologists have been deluded in their acceptance of food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) as the standard tool for dietary assessment in large studies of diet and cancer. The substantial limitations of FFQs have been known for some time (1) and published studies based on FFQ-derived data have long included in their discussion sections a litany o...

The Food Frequency Questionnaire abandonment debate: time to resolve.

The food frequency questionnaire.

To the Editors: Of course we agree with Kristal et al. (1) that validity is an issue of degree rather than a dichotomy and that multiple methods will usually be useful when evaluating validity because a perfect standard is rarely available. However, their examples based on face validity, construct validity, and predictive validity do not provide evidence that food frequency questionnaires shoul...