Food Nutrition: Better Guidance Needed to Improve Reliability of USDA's
Food Composition Data (Letter Report, 10/25/93, GAO/RCED-94-30).

The Agriculture Department (USDA) is the world's main source of
published information on the composition of foods and their nutritional
value, but poor documentation on how some data were produced and weak
oversight of contracted laboratory studies cast a cloud over the
information's accuracy.  Many federal agencies depend on USDA's food
composition information--vitamin and mineral contents as well as
caloric, fat, cholesterol, and carbohydrate values.  For example, the
Department of Health and Human Services is trying to improve Americans'
health through better nutrition, USDA needs an accurate picture of the
nutritional content of school meals, and the Pentagon is surveying the
nutritional adequacy of soldiers' diets.  Yet GAO found that USDA's
criteria and procedures for evaluating food composition data are vague,
giving Agriculture staff considerable latitude in determining the amount
and type of scientific information needed to qualify information for
inclusion in USDA's database.  In some cases, data have been accepted
with little or no supporting documentation on the testing and quality
assurance procedures used to develop the data.  For example, data on
bacon-cheeseburgers mainly came from brochures provided by fast-food
chains.  Although USDA cooperates and exchanges food composition data
with foreign countries and international groups, USDA seldom uses
foreign food composition data because (1) U.S.-produced data are
generally available and (2) the nutrition content of foreign-grown foods
differs from that of the same food grown in the United States because of
differences in climate, processing techniques, handling, and storage.

--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------

 REPORTNUM:  RCED-94-30
     TITLE:  Food Nutrition: Better Guidance Needed to Improve 
             Reliability of USDA's Food Composition Data
      DATE:  10/25/93
   SUBJECT:  Nutrition research
             Data collection operations
             Quality control
             Agricultural products
             Computer networks
             Quality assurance
             International cooperation
             Government publications
             Data bases
             Data integrity
IDENTIFIER:  HNIS National Nutrient Data Bank Electronic Bulletin Board
             
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