The Dietary Screener in the 2009 California Health Interview Survey

A new dietary screener was administered in the 2009 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). The 2009 CHIS screener asks respondents for information about how frequently they consume foods in 10 categories. No portion size questions are asked.

This screener does not attempt to assess total diet. The questions allow researchers to gather information about intakes of fruits and vegetables and teaspoons of added sugars. In addition, a question on frequency of eating fast food is asked. Fruit and vegetable intake is quantified using the cup equivalents metric, based on the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) MyPyramid Equivalents Database (MPED; version 2.0 for USDA Survey Foods, 2003-2004) and cited in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

The 2009 CHIS Diet Screener is composed of QA09_C13 to QA09_C21 of the CHIS 2009 Adult Questionnaire. In addition to variables for these questions, the following variables were computed:

These created variables are available on the CHIS Web site under "Public Use Data Files".

In CHIS 2009, we applied rules for excluding extreme data responses, described in Scoring Procedures. Scoring Procedures also describes the process of scoring the individual response data. A description and guidelines for the appropriate uses of the screener-estimated dietary intakes are found in Variance Adjustment. Validation results for the CHIS 2009 screener are presented in Validation.

NOTE: The dietary variables on the CHIS dataset are in their natural units. For analyses, however, they must be transformed to approximate normal distributions. For cup equivalents of fruits and vegetables, use the square root transformation. For teaspoons of added sugars, use the cube root transformation. After analyses, the results can be back-transformed for easier interpretation.