Historical overview of diet assessment and food consumption surveys in Spain: assessment methods and applications.

The food consumption assessment methods are used in nutrition and health population surveys and are the basis for the development of guidelines, nutritional recommendations and health plans, The study of these issues is one of the major tasks of the research and health policy in developed countries. Major advances nationally in this area have been made since 1940, both in the reliability of the data and in the standardization of studies, which is a necessary condition to compare changes over time. In this article the history and application of different dietary surveys, dietary history and food frequency records are analyzed. Besides information from surveys conducted at a national level, the main data currently available for public health planning in nutrition comes from nutritional analysis of household budget surveys and food balance sheets, based on data provided by the Ministry of Agriculture.