Extending a multiethnic food composition table to include standardized food group servings

There is a growing awareness that foods may have health benefits that go beyond their nutrient components. Therefore, nutrient database developers are being asked to provide databases that allow estimates of food group intakes as well as nutrient intake. Methodology for a standardized food-grouping system was recently developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The Pyramid Servings Database (PSD) disaggregates most foods into their ingredients and then allocates each of these ingredients to one of 30 food groups. The Cancer Research Center of Hawaii has a food composition database with many unique foods because of our multi-ethnic population. We recently completed a project to add Pyramid Servings to each of the 1286 ingredients on our food composition database. The methodology we describe here may be useful to other researchers who want to calculate food group intake in a standard manner using the PSD but who must first link their database to the one from USDA. We highlight several foods on our database that were not present in the PSD or that did not match well to foods on the PSD. With a careful examination of energy and fat composition data, and the use of an energy adjustment factor, we were able to assign the appropriate number of Pyramid Servings to all foods.