There are many minerals, vitamins and other food constituents that we need for optimal health. Sufficiency or excess of many key nutrients and other aspects of human nutritional status can be assessed through the analysis of biological samples. If you want to know about the nutrition status of your research participants, patients or clients, which nutrients and nutritional conditions are most important to you. To make it clear, the goal here is not to assess one or two specific nutrients because of a particular research question or prompted by clinical symptoms. This is strictly for global, non-targeted nutrition assessment. The preferred portfolio of assessment indicators will obviously depend on the target group and area of interest, so it would be helpful to hear about the rationale for the selection.
Anthropometric Methods & General clinical examination, with special attention to organs like hair, angles of the mouth, gums, nails, skin, eyes, tongue, muscles, bones, & thyroid gland.
Detection of relevant signs helps in establishing the nutritional diagnosis
Also the complete blood picture, bone density Stool examination for the presence of ova and/or intestinal parasites and Urine dipstick & microscopy for albumin, sugar and blood
We have Anthropometric measurements, clinical examination for signs and symptoms, Biochemical analysis for any biochemical indicators, and Diet history or dietary assessments to help you find out the deficient nutrients from ones diet.
Under Anthropometric assessment, we need to find parameters like, Weight, height, Age, Waist hip ratio, %body fatness, Skin fold thickness and many more. This helps us find the current nutrition situation and status of this client.
Clinical assessments: this will provide detection of nutritional deficiencies by examining the different body organs like eyes, nails, fingers, tongue, muscles bone stomach and so on..
Biochemical assessments help us find specific biochemical makers relating to specific nutrient deficiencies or toxicities. For example serum, albumin, urine.
Dietary assessments: From the previous diet records of the patient, we can tell the missing or excess nutrients in the diet, these methods include, FFQs, 24 hr recall, food records etc.
From these, just pick the most relevant to your study according to your target population and which condition you are investigating. But you can't miss to have some few anthropometric measurements in you study if your dealing with nutrition status.
Goodluck!
Calories and protein intake are the most strongly affect optimal human health
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