Development of an Arabic food composition database for use in an Arabic online dietary assessment tool (myfood24)

Abstract

A comprehensive food composition database (FCDB) is essential for assessing dietary intake of nutrients. However, currently available food composition data for Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) is limited. The aim was to develop an Arabic FCDB of foods commonly available in the GCC (initial focus on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), which will be integrated into an Arabic version of an online dietary assessment tool, myfood24. The Arabic FCDB was built using a standardized approach identifying currently available foods from existing food composition tables (FCTs), research articles, back-of-pack (BOP) nutrient labels on food products, with additional generic food items from the UK Composition of Foods Integrated Database (CoFID). The development of the FCDB used a 6-step approach: food identification, cleaning, mapping, translation, allocating portion sizes, and quality checking. The database includes a total of 2016 food items, 30 % of which have standard portion size images in addition to other options for portion size estimation. The database and myfood24 have been translated into Arabic to be suitable for Arabic users. These tools will help to assess dietary intake for 51 million people in the GCC. Future work will cover more foods from other Middle Eastern countries to serve over 400 million Arabic speakers in the region.