Conceptual Framework of an Integrated Database System for Nutritional Studies

Nutritional studies are aimed at evaluating all aspects of human nutrition and they need different types of information for this purpose. Food intake data, nutritional requirements, food composition data and data on other substances contained in food products are necessary in order to obtain an estimation of dietary adequacy as well as food safety evaluation. Such information can be provided by several sources and the main issue to be tackled is linking them within a computerized framework for information retrieval and statistical data processing. The core of the database design is composed by the different typologies of data structured in order to obtain the expected results, i.e. nutrients and other food components intake useful for estimating dietary adequacy and risk exposure. Each set of results requires a lot of work to collect the right information to be imputed and to develop software procedures. The design of the database structure is necessarily the first step of this task because it allows a clear identification of the focal points. In the second step, a suitable approach for each problem can be identified and tested by implementing adequate software. Knowledge of the whole process facilitates the interpretation of the results especially when a comparison between different studies is performed.