A well-balanced diet is essential for all individuals in that it aids in minimizing the chances of developing health-related disease conditions. Some of the disease conditions that may arise through consumption of poor diets almost always resulting from poor eating habits include heart conditions (e.g. heart attack/ heart failure), diabetes, obesity, cancer, and respiratory conditions (Bernardo et al., 2015). There are various instruments that are used by nurses to monitor amount, type, and quality of food consumption to conclude on diagnostic features of health related disease conditions such as the aforementioned (Guo, Yuan & Yue, 2013). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the use of the Diet History Questionnaire II as one such instrument used by nurses according to literature.
The Diet History …show more content…
The developers designed his questionnaire with the idea that it could be easily used by medical researchers, clinicians, primary caregivers and even teachers without obtaining permission from developers (Bernardo et al., 2015). The original form of this questionnaire referred to as the Diet History Questionnaire I was priory designed based on cognitive findings of research with the expectations that it was going to be an easy-to=use instrument. Its components were 124 food items in addition to the size of food portions and questions regarding an individual's food supplements consumed. The DHQ II is an improvement of the DHQ I with a list of 134 food items in addition to eight other questions pertaining the individual's food supplements (Guo, Yuan & Yue, 2013). There are both manual and electronic forms of these questionnaires, and the user can decide to use any that is convenient to him or her although the electronic form is less time-consuming and efficient for computer literate groups of