Comparison of 3 different nutrient databases

Food composition tables are absolutely basic tools in the field of nutrition and health. In Croatia beside the Croatian food composition tables (CFCT) which are poor with nutrients information (only 34 nutrients are presented for 530 raw food items) and the last issue date from 1990, foreign food composition databases are in use to. The aim of this study was to evaluate the comparability of nutrient content of 122 all-day meals with 3 different databases. All-day meals were takeover from the elderly nursing home in Croatia and they were analyzed using the CFCT, USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference and Danish Food Composition Databank (DFCD). Estimates for 23 nutrients were compared (energy, macronutrient, water, 5 vitamins and 8 minerals). The differences between nutrient values obtained from each of the 3 databases were calculated. These differences were calculated for each menu, and then averaged across the 122 all-day meals for each of the 23 nutrients. Pearson’ s correlation coefficient was calculated to measure the associations between CFCT and USDA, and between CFCT and DFCD for all investigated nutrients. In both cases correlation coefficient were high (0.28-0.99) for 20 of the 23 nutrients examined. Our results indicate that for a dominant part of the examined nutrients CFCT is comparable with USDA or DFCD. Therefore these foreign food databases could be used for nutrients intake evaluation in Croatia for the raw and fresh food commonly available at Croatian market including unprocessed items (e.g. rice, milk, meat poultry, fish, fruit, vegetable) and processed food (e.g. pudding, jam, tomato sauce, compote, meat loaf).