Use of a web-based dietary assessment tool in early pregnancy

Eating well during pregnancy gives your baby the best possible start in life. A healthy diet provides the vitamins and minerals your baby needs to grow and develop, while also supporting your own health during your pregnancy. However, it can be difficult to know whether you are getting enough of these important nutrients from your everyday food choices.

This study looked at the MyDietScore dietary assessment app which has been designed to quickly evaluate the quality of a woman's diet for pregnancy. More than 500 women in early pregnancy completed both the app and a detailed, scientifically validated nutrition questionnaire that is widely used by nutrition researchers. The research team then compared the results from both methods to see how accurately the scores from the app reflected the women's intake of key nutrients for pregnancy.

The MyDietScore app performed very impressively. Women who received higher scores from the app had healthier diets overall and consumed greater amounts of many of the vitamins and minerals that are especially important during pregnancy. These included folate, iron, vitamin B12, calcium, iodine, zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D and magnesium. These nutrients are essential to support your baby's brain development, skeletal health, immune function, oxygen supply and overall growth in utero, while also helping to keep you healthy throughout your pregnancy.

Importantly, from an overall dietary quality perspective, the app does a lot more than simply measure calories. Apart from reflecting higher intakes of a wide range of nutrients that are essential for pregnancy, higher scores from the app also predicted better intakes of fibre, fruit, vegetables and other nutrient-rich foods. It was also clear that women with higher dietary quality scores from the app had lower intakes of fat, saturated fat, sugary foods and refined sugars. These findings mean that the MyDietScore app provides a clear and accurate picture of the overall nutritional quality of your diet for pregnancy rather than focusing on just single foods or nutrients in isolation.

One of the biggest advantages of this approach is its simplicity. Instead of asking you to record every food in detail to calculate the nutritional quality of your diet, the app uses information from a few simple questions about your usual eating habits to generate an easy-to-understand score. Despite this straightforward approach however, this study showed that these scores closely reflect the intake of foods, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that are vital to a healthy pregnancy.

Overall, this research shows that the MyDietScore app provides a quick, reliable and practical way to check the nutritional quality of your diet during pregnancy. By identifying whether your eating habits are providing ideal amounts of the essential vitamins and minerals required for you and your growing baby, it can help you to recognise where small dietary changes or further nutritional advice may be beneficial. Used early in pregnancy, it has the potential to optimise dietary quality, support healthier pregnancies and give babies the best possible start in life.