American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol 19, 247-254, Copyright © 1966 by The American Society for Clinical Nutrition, Inc.

Rapid Evaluation of Nutritional Level

A Community-Screening Project

¹ From Servizio Nutrizione, Ministero della Sanitá, Rome, Italy

It is generally accepted that evaluation of the nutritional level of communities is a sine qua non for planning and controlling programs of applied nutrition.

Several technics for evaluation are in use. Most of these require surveys on food consumption, estimation of nutritional requirements and complicated chemical analyses. These technics, when used for large developing countries, are time consuming and expensive; furthermore, the results obtained are often approximate and questionable for several reasons (such as psychologic difficulties, lack of statistical data and ignorance of chemical composition of food items).

In my experience, the so-called "rapid survey" method is the most practical technic for a preliminary evaluation of the nutritional level of a community. It consists of two parts: collection and elaboration of existing data and anthropometric and clinical examination of a representative group of subjects six to eleven years of age. The advantages offered by this survey are short duration, low cost, representativeness for the whole country, information for further surveys and reliability for planning programs of applied nutrition.