Abstract

The distribution of usual intakes of dietary components is important to individuals formulating food policy and to persons designing nutrition education programs. The authors suggest a methodology for estimating usual intake distributions that allows for varying degrees of departure from normality and recognizes the measurement error associated with one-day dietary intakes. The approach is applied to data from the 1985 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals and works well for a set of dietary components that are consumed nearly daily and exhibit varying distributional shapes. Published in Journal of the American Statistical Association 91(436):1440-49, December 1996. (Replaces 92-WP 99; 95-SR 74.)