Department of Nutritional Sciences

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/1807/16974

The Department of Nutritional Sciences is one of the few departments of nutrition in North America to be located within a Faculty of Medicine. This, together with its close linkages with University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, allows the department to fully explore the relationships between nutrition and human health and disease, and to influence clinical practice and public health programs. It also creates unique opportunities for collaboration with the highest concentration of university-affiliated hospitals, clinicians and health researchers in North America.

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    How to Create a Student-Generated Database, in a Large Nutrition Class, to Illustrate the Analysis of Nutrient and Food Intakes
    (Wiley Online Library, 2017-01-17) Gurfinkel, Debbie; Wolever, Thomas M. S.
    The completion of a three-day food record, using commonly available nutrient analysis software, is a typical assignment for students in nutrition and food science programs. While these assignments help students evaluate their personal diets, it is insufficient to teach students about surveys of large population cohorts. This paper shows how the Test, Survey and Pools tool in the learning management system Blackboard™ (Blackboard Inc.) was used to collect the individual food and nutrition intake data from the three-day food records of students in a large introductory nutrition class. This student-generated database was then be used to illustrate population level analyses. Examples of the types of analyses include a) use of the E.A.R. cut point method to identify nutrients of concern, b) the use of food intakes to determine the proportion of students consuming the recommended servings of foods from each food group, c) the analysis of intakes of nutrients that are overconsumed such as salt, saturated fat and trans fat, and d) correlations between macronutrients (e.g. as fat intake increases, carbohydrate intake decreases). The use of a database, derived from the students own food intakes, connects with student interests, and the analyses of such a database illustrates an authentic task in the nutritional sciences.