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Welcome to the third New Zealand (NZ) Nutrition Survey Development stakeholder newsletter.
The newsletters provide updates on the methods and tools being developed for a New Zealand Nutrition Survey and give you, our stakeholders, an opportunity to provide feedback should you wish to.
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NZ Nutrition Survey Development Update
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UPCOMING WEBINAR
Behind the Scenes: Developing Methods for a National Nutrition Survey
Join us for a zoom webinar on the tools and methods being developed for a National Nutrition Survey.
Date: Thursday 13th July
Time: 10am – 11.30am
To register your interest click on the REGISTER NOW button below
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NZ Nutrition Society Conference:
Dr Mary-Ann Carter (Te Whatu Ora), Associate Professor Lisa Te Morenga (Massey University Wellington), and Dr Berit Follong (National Institute for Health Innovation) presented on the development work being done for the Nutrition Survey at the NZ Nutrition Society Conference in Wellington (December 2022). The presentation sparked a lot of interest with many conference attendees signing up for the stakeholder newsletter.
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Some of our team attending the NSNZ conference in Wellington in December:
Caitlin Haliburton, Dr Leanne Young, Dr Kathryn Bradbury, Dr Berit Follong, Dr Sally Mackay, and Professor Cliona Ni Mhurchu (Project Lead)
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Development of NZ food list:
Intake 24 automatically matches each food a participant enters to an appropriate food in the food list. This means that the food list needs to be developed in advance. Selecting foods for the list is a balance between having enough foods so that participants can find a food they ate, but not overwhelming them with too long a list of foods to choose from. The final list of 2632 New Zealand foods and beverages was built in collaboration with colleagues from Manatu Hauora, Ministry for Primary Industries, and Plant and Food Research. The UK Intake24 team has uploaded the list into Intake24 and over the last few months our University of Auckland team has been busy checking each item, matching to images (see food photography below), assigning portion sizes, and adding prompts like ‘Did you have spread on your bread?
Cognitive testing of dietary habits questionnaire:
Toward the end of 2022, the project team undertook cognitive testing with 69 participants to ensure that 12 new or amended dietary habits questions were acceptable and well-understood by all New Zealanders. All interviews have now been transcribed and the project team is busy analysing the results. Once the results have been analysed, they will be used to inform any further modifications that need to be made to the questions. |
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Food portion size photography
Following the completion of the food list and its upload into Intake24, each food needed to be matched to appropriate portion size images. There were existing food images from the UK and Australia, however, because of the diverse cuisines consumed in Aotearoa, new images were required for some foods.
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| In February the project team photographed 138 new portion size images over two days. The new images consisted mostly of traditional Māori and Pacific dishes (e.g. boil-up, hāngī, palusami, chop suey), and packaged foods where the branding or package size differed substantially from UK or Australian images. To ensure the dishes were authentic, discussions were held with Māori and Pacific cooks and many of the dishes were prepared on a local Marae or sourced from a Pacific caterer. |
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Other work completed to date
- We have held four meetings each with our Technical Advisory Group and Māori Advisory Group since the project began in October 2021.
- Nutritional biomarker and anthropometric measures have been reviewed and prioritised for inclusion in the survey and a comprehensive analysis of how these are best measured was undertaken.
- Ethics approval was obtained from the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee to test the usability of Intake24 with a convenience sample of approximately 30 NZ children and adults. Recruitment kicked off in April and we have almost recruited all participants. We are still recruiting Māori participants over 65 years old. If you or anyone you know may be interested then please use THIS LINK to obtain more information about what the study involves.
- A subcontract is in place with the UK National Diet & Nutrition Surveys team at the University of Cambridge who have developed a NZ locale (version) of Intake 24 and are providing support to our internal team as we tailor the NZ locale for use in NZ.
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What will we be working on next?
Over the next quarter the team will be focusing on:
- Continued development of the NZ food list and linkage to appropriate food composition data.
- Collating information on biomarkers that can be measured in accredited NZ laboratories, as well as costs.
- Making any modifications required to the dietary habits questionnaire.
- Completing usability testing of Intake24 with NZ users and summarising the feedback to improve the functionality of the tool.
- Hosting our final Technical Advisory Group and Māori Advisory Group meetings, which will be held in July.
- Presenting our NZ Survey Development work at the International Conference on Diet & Activity Methods (ICDAM) 2023 in Limerick, Ireland in June.
- Hosting a stakeholder webinar on the tools and methods being developed for the national nutrition survey on 13th July.
- Preparing the final report and recommendations for Manatū Hauora.
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Contact Information
If you would like to provide feedback on anything in this newsletter or if you have questions, please email Maria Maiquez (Project Coordinator)
Email: nsdevelopment@auckland.ac.nz
Feel free to share this newsletter with colleagues. If anyone new would like to be added to the newsletter distribution list please email us.
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| You have received this newsletter because you have been identified as one of our key stakeholders. If you would like to unsubscribe, please email us. |
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