Comparison of correlation coefficients of dietary consumption and usual intake distributions by gender

Usual intake refers to the long-term average consumption of a particular food or nutrient over an extended period, serving as a crucial foundation for establishing nutrition and public health policies.Estimating usual intake requires long-term consumption data.Instead of directly collecting such data, conventional analytical methods use statistical models to generate simulated consumption data for analysis.The correlation of intake amount plays a crucial role in the process of generating simulated intake.To generate simulated intake, at least two days of dietary intake data are required, and these data are used to derive the correlation coefficient of intake amount.Previous studies have derived correlations by analyzing the entire dataset without dividing it based on demographic factors such as gender.In this study, we examine whether there are differences in the correlation coefficients obtained by dividing the data by gender.We also compare the usual intake distribution derived using the correlation coefficient from the entire dataset with the usual intake distribution derived using the correlation coefficients from gender-segregated data.An empirical analysis using the nutrient data from the 2019 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES) confirmed significant differences in both the correlation coefficients and the usual intake distributions.