A unique screening tool that allows clinicians to efficiently assess a patient’s dietary patterns.

The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) aims to help healthcare professionals incorporate a food-as-medicine approach into their practice by assessing and tracking the proportion of unrefined plant-based foods and water intake in patients’ diets. We have developed clinical tools to support this. pattern.

The ACLM Diet Screener is a 27-item dietary assessment tool available for free on the ACLM website that is designed to guide clinical conversations about diet and support nutritional prescribing while also being useful in daily clinical practice. It’s concise enough to use. A multidisciplinary team of clinicians provided input on the development of the tool.

Although other dietary assessment tools exist, the ACLM Diet Screener is particularly suited to the needs of lifestyle medicine clinicians, who tend to prescribe primarily plant-based diets and provide a complete picture of the entire diet. , is unique because it includes a simple scale that is easy to understand. Dr. Michaela Carlsen, ACLM senior director of research, said this is doable for patients.

Dr. Carlsen is the lead author of a paper on the development of the screener. Frontiers of nutrition.

“Studies show that a variety of plant-based diets are associated with a lower risk of chronic disease and may be an effective intervention in the treatment of cardiovascular disease and even remission of type 2 diabetes. ” said Dr. Carlsen. “However, clinicians clearly needed a tool to bridge their nutritional research into the clinical setting and support treatment protocols and patient behavior changes.The ACLM Diet Screener was created with these goals in mind. It was developed by

The team that began developing the tool in 2021 included lifestyle medicine physicians and nutrition researchers. The team consulted a wide range of resources, including the U.S. Dietary Guidelines and My His Plate, the DASH Diet and the Healthy Eating Index. For purposes of identifying specific foods and beverages for inclusion in screening and how to classify them, we use tools listed in the National Institutes of Health’s Registry of Validated Short-Term Dietary Assessment Instruments.

After an iterative design process and pilot testing period, the final version of the screener included 20 questions on food intake, 6 questions on beverage intake, and 1 question on nutrients and supplements. Food categories include fruits, leafy green vegetables, legumes, meat, eggs, and seafood dishes, as well as fast food, frozen foods, restaurant/takeout, and fried foods.

Once the questionnaire is completed, summary scores are tabulated for total whole plant food frequency as a percentage of total food frequency, and for total water frequency as a percentage of total beverage frequency. A summary of your scores can be easily and quickly viewed by members of your care team. You can also format the summary into a simple pie chart for clinical conversation purposes with patients, if time permits. The screener includes pictures of foods to represent the categories, making the questionnaire easy to understand for all patients.

According to , nearly 90% of the 539 healthcare professionals who participated in a pilot evaluation of the Diet Screener reported that the Diet Screener was short enough to use in clinical practice, and 68% reported that it was He replied that he planned to do so. Frontiers of nutrition paper.

“Time is a major barrier for clinicians who want to have meaningful conversations with patients about dietary patterns and other lifestyle behaviors,” said Dr. said one Erin Campbell, MD, MPH. Rochester Medical Nutrition Research Center.

“One recent study found that in a typical patient encounter, physicians only spend about a quarter of their time directly interacting with the patient, and the remaining half of their time is spent on administrative tasks such as electronic medical records. Screeners found this useful despite the time constraints they faced.

Another unique aspect of the screener is its relevance to various ethnic and cultural groups, including African Americans, Hispanics/Latino Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Indian Americans. Subject matter experts representing these demographic groups reviewed the food examples and recommended additions based on their cultural perspectives and experiences.

“We wanted it to be relevant to the widest possible audience. There are other screening tools that target specific populations, but the ACLM Diet Screener, which We don’t know of a single tool that is so flexible for a population,” said study author Susan Friedman, MD, MPH, DipABLM, FACLM, professor of medicine at the University of Rochester. “We hope that clinicians will find this tool useful for a wide variety of patients, even if their practices are extremely busy.”