Problems Associated with Dietary Assessment in Nigeria

ABSTRACT
Dietary assessment is a scientific assessment of eating pattern that could detect nutrient deficiency. Accurate and representative dietary data are essential to scientists, policy makers, and many other stakeholders. This is because it is important for planning, developing and evaluating nutrition intervention programs. Despite the importance of dietary assessment data for a broad range of policy and research applications, there are some problems/challenges encountered when it comes to the assessment of dietary data in Nigeria. Currently, there is a lack of time-relevant dietary data in Nigerian on which the government can base their programme on. There is a general lack of commitment by government at all levels such that researchers are not given adequate financial support. The poor funding/lack of funds for conducting dietary assessment research, variation in food preparation/the use of non-standard recipes, culture/language barrier, time burden, insecurity and lack of comprehensive country-specific food composition data are some of the barriers/problems to dietary data collection in Nigeria