Neither of the two systems is adequate alone. A single international system may not be possible. There is no inherent incompatibility between the two systems which can be used in parallel. Program managers should take a pragmatic approach and choose a system depending the objective. Regulatory input should be offered.
International collaboration is important to develop the system.
The food intake data collection is handled by the EPIC-software that has been developed especially for this epidemiological study. The EPIC-software uses a LanguaL derived concept of faceted thesaurus to describe and classify the reported foods. A common classification system was derived for the 9 country study, based on food group dependent questions asked in the software guided interview. The number of questions and answer-descriptors per food group varies from 4 to 15. The terminology was modified from LanguaL to make the terms meaningful to both interviewers and subjects.