UTILITY OF THE MINNESOTA EATING PATTERN ASSESSMENT TOOL IN TRACKING DIETARY LIPID INTAKE DURING EXERCISE TRAINING 1665

The Eating Pattern Assessment Tool (EPAT) is a short, self-administered questionnaire designed to give health care providers a simple method for assessing dietary lipids intake for counseling purposes. The validity and reliability of this tool were previously demonstrated in an upper midwestern clinical population. The EPAT was used in the HERITAGE Family Study to track the consistency of dietary intake of fat and cholesterol by participants throughout a 20-week exercise training period. Participants were 390 sedentary individuals from 70 Caucasian and African-American families, aged 16 to 66 yrs, from 4 regions of North America. At baseline, participants completed both sections of the EPAT (PRE), filled out the Willett semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire (FFQ), and had blood taken for a pre-training lipid profile. Subjects repeat-ed the EPAT at week 10 (MID) and at week 20 (POST). Section I of the baseline EPAT showed reasonably good, highly significant correlations (r=0.40 to 0.55) with fat and cholesterol items from the FFQ(P<.0001). However, no such correlations were found for Section II. Both sections of the PRE, and fat and cholesterol related items from the FFQ, were poorly correlated with plasma total cholesterol and its lipoprotein fractions. Intraclass correlations coefficients for PRE, MID, and POST scores reached 0.78 for Section I and 0.65 for Section II, coefficients comparable to those previously reported from a less diverse population not participating in an exercise program. We conclude that our study participants were consistent through-out the exercise program in their dietary intake of fat and cholesterol. Our results also confirm the repeatability of the EPAT and the validity of Section I in tracking dietary lipid intake in a diverse population during an extended exercise training study.