Project: An Evaluation of the USDA’s Healthy Eating Index
Award Year: 2000
Amount of award, fiscal 2000: $35,000.00
Institution: Syracuse University
Principal Investigator: John Cook
Status: Completed
Detailed Objective: This project examines whether the predictive performance of the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) could be improved by modifying its construction. Two recent studies have shown that the HEI does moderately well in predicting cardiovascular disease but not cancer or overall mortality.

The study centers around three questions:

  • How do we aggregate the HEI components to arrive at an index or indexes that reflect the variation in the components?
  • Based on the index or indexes, how many distinct diet quality groups exist in the population?
  • How are these diet quality groups related to socioeconomic characteristics and health outcome measures?

These questions will be addressed using the latent class/mixture methodology. USDA's Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII) will be the primary source of the data to be used in this study.

Topic: Dietary Intake and Quality
Dataset: Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII)