Grant: Project Grant

Dietary risk factors are among the top contributors to morbidity and mortality in Canada and globally. There is increasing attention to the harmful impact of ultra-processed foods and beverages (UPF) on dietary quality and health, yet no validated instrument exists to rapidly measure the intake of UPF. Consumption of UPF has been linked to poor diet quality and increased risk for obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases in many countries, including in Canada. In 2015, UPF made up half of the average daily energy consumed by Canadian and the 2019 Canada's Food Guide recommends limiting 'highly' processed or UPF. There is a need to develop an instrument that has the ability to rapidly measure UPF intake for use in a range of research, clinical and public health practice settings and that is based on Canadian's dietary patterns. To this end, the goal of this project is to enable the monitoring of consumption of UPF, a potent indicator of diet quality, in Canadian research through the development and validation of a brief UPF Screener that can be integrated into ongoing surveillance and cohort studies, as well as in clinical and public health practice. The scope of the project requires a multi-disciplinary research team with distinct and related expertise in public health and clinical nutrition, epidemiology, dietary assessment, instrument development and validation, which we have assembled. The UPF Screener will be developed in both official languages of Canada (English and French), and will be based on nationally representative dietary data, evaluated by an Expert Advisory Committee, tested with Canadian adults in Montreal city and revised to ensure rigor and relevance. The UPF Screener will produce a score that estimates individual and population level intake of UPF intake as an indicator of unhealthy diets, which can be used in surveillance, intervention and epidemiology.